Meta has finally found a willing buyer for Giphy, the animated GIF search engine it acquired for $400 million three years ago.
Shutterstock announced today that it has reached an agreement with Meta to purchase Giphy in a transaction “consisting of $53 million in net cash paid upon closing,” including working capital. The company expects the deal to close next month, with Meta also signing a commercial agreement to continue accessing Giphy’s content across its suite of products.
The news comes about seven months after UK competition regulator Meta issued a final order to sell Giphy, saying the merger reduced dynamic competition. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) originally ordered the sale back in November 2021, but the appeal process delayed matters for the better part of another year.
In October of last year, Meta confirmed it would not file any further objections and reluctantly agreed to divest Giphy, but the formal divestiture process didn’t officially begin until the CMA issue its final order in January of this year, giving Meta a set deadline to sell its asset — TechCrunch is told this was likely a six-month window, meaning the clock was ticking for Facebook’s parent company to close a deal.
The terms of sale meant that Meta had to sell Giphy in its entirety rather than in parts, and that it had to find a legitimate buyer — a company that would keep Giphy running as a GIF search engine.
