Relay

» see relay.im as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In February 2013 a Toronto company put an app in the App Store whose whole argument was that typing is a slow way to answer somebody. Relay handed you a search box and a wall of animated GIFs, and you sent one of those instead of a sentence. The seed round closed the same month at $700,000, with Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures in it next to Social+Capital and a pair of Canadian funds. That was real money for a premise most people still filed under jokes.

It worked better than the premise suggested. By late 2014 the app had passed 700,000 downloads and was moving more than ten million GIF messages a month against a library of roughly 6.5 million files. Those are not Facebook numbers. For a two-year-old product built by a small team around one file format, they describe a thing that was working.

Then Kik bought it. On 19 November 2014 the Waterloo messaging company announced a $38.3 million Series C round and, in the same press release, the first acquisition it had ever made. Joe Rideout and Jon McGee took positions at Kik. Relay got a date instead: the app would stop working on 15 December, twenty-six days after anybody heard about any of it.

I did not have this one. By 2014 my phone messaging was WhatsApp, the way everyone's around me was, and the GIF layer reached me later and through somebody else's product entirely. Relay sat in app stores I could technically reach for a year and a half and never once came up in anything I read.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ a search box full of reaction ~

The thing Relay understood early was that a GIF is not a picture you are sharing. It is a sentence you are declining to write. The app was built around search rather than around a camera roll, so the question it asked was never "what do you have" but "what do you mean", and it answered with a grid you scrolled until something matched the feeling.

That reframing is why the acquisition made sense to Kik. Kik's own pitch in 2014 was advertising inside conversations, and a company that had already taught 700,000 people to answer each other with sponsored-friendly visual content was a shortcut to the format.

~ twenty-six days ~

The shutdown notice was headed "We're joining Kik!" and it did the thing those notices always do, which is tell you about the vision before it tells you about the date. It called the animated GIF the most expressive and emotion-packed content on the web, then put the download count and the monthly message volume underneath as proof the bet had paid off. The closure sat below all of that.

Twenty-six days is a short window even by acqui-hire standards. It did not leave room for an export tool, and there was not much to export anyway: a Relay conversation was a stream of links to files that lived somewhere else. When the service went off, what disappeared was the index, not the images. Archive Team got some of the GIFs through the Wayback Machine and ArchiveBot, and recorded the result honestly as partial.

~ the keyboard that came after ~

Relay's actual legacy is that it was right about eighteen months too early for anyone to pay it for being right. Apple opened iOS to third-party keyboards in September 2014, two months before the acquisition, and within two years a GIF search field was sitting inside iMessage and inside Android's own keyboard. The feature Relay was a whole company for became a button.

Giphy, founded the same year, took the other road and sold itself to Facebook in 2020 for $400 million. Both companies had the same idea and the difference was where they put it. Giphy built the library and licensed it to everybody; Relay built a messenger around the library, so when the library turned into infrastructure the messenger had nothing left to be.

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