You know all those crazy and cool animated GIFs you see just about everywhere. Posted on discussion boards and blogs spanning the internet – from avatars to witty comments… A picture is worth a thousand words – a great animated GIF does it 10 times that. Well if you thought they just magically appeared – you were wrong. They come from GIPHY. The industrious elves that provide these GIFs have created gazillions of these bits of animated joy and GIPHY is now serving over one billion of them each month. Pretty incredible.
GIPHY served millions of GIFs in their very first weeks of operations. Betaworks head of Product, Paul Murphy, stated; “We could tell we struck a nerve, so we swarmed it”.
GIPHY was offering up $100,000 in preferred equity which was immediately funded on Alphaworks. Pre-money valuation was set at $13 million with $2.4 million previously committed.
Alphaworks is a fairly new equity crowdfunding platform that has only listed a few companies. Their last offer Quibb raised over $150,000 in just 48 hours. Alphaworks is on a mission to empower communities to become owners in companies they love. The platform embodies the investment crowdfunding ethos in many respects. They see crowdfunding as a fundamental shift in the way startups and SMEs raise capital and grow their businesses.
Alphaworks does benefit from their association with Betaworks (who has a cool new logo) – a startup “studio” and seed stage funding company in NYC. Betaworks was founded by John Borthwick and Andy Weissman. They have assisted many big name (now) companies find their way – including Kickstarter.
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