Google acquires Tenor

Tenor
Tenor
Published in
2 min readMar 27, 2018

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Tenor will operate under the Tenor brand to help people visually express their thoughts and emotions

Three and a half years ago, Tenor brought GIFs to mobile messaging with the launch of the first GIF Keyboard on iOS. Tenor’s growth has been explosive since launch — we’re the leading GIF-sharing app on mobile, and Tenor works with the largest messaging apps and social platforms, from Facebook to Samsung, to help people better express their thoughts and feelings with GIFs. We passed 300 million users in 2017, and earlier this year we passed 12 billion search requests per month.

We celebrated the launch of the first ever sponsored GIF in late 2017, and since then, Tenor has worked with dozens of major brands. Dunkin Donuts’ GIF campaign on Tenor was honored with an award at Mobile World Congress last month for Best Use of Mobile Marketing.

We’ve continued to make it faster and easier for people to find the perfect GIF that captures exactly what they are feeling. In 2017, more than four billion distinct search terms, from “lol” to “high five,” were entered into Tenor — the key is helping people effortlessly express any emotion.

The rapid growth of Tenor shows we’re only scratching the surface of the opportunity in front of us. Today, we’re announcing Tenor has been acquired by Google to help us execute on our mission to help all three billion mobile users find the perfect way to visually express themselves.

The acquisition will enable us to accelerate improvements to Tenor’s service for our users, API partners, content partners, and advertisers. Tenor will continue to operate as a separate brand to better serve you, and I will continue to lead the Tenor team alongside my co-founders Erick Hachenburg and Frank Nawabi.

Lastly, we want to extend a massive thank you to the people who use Tenor every day to communicate your innermost feelings. We’re honored by your support and would not be here without you.

We look forward to the next leg of our journey with Google as we grow Tenor to help anyone with a mobile device visually express the full range of human emotion.

David McIntosh, Tenor CEO

Read Google’s blog here; find Tenor press assets here.

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