Stipop Sells the Stickers Behind the Apps You Already Use

A sticker is a small thing. You tap one, it lands in a chat, someone laughs, and nobody thinks about the machinery underneath. Stipop thinks about the machinery. The company, founded in Seoul in 2017 and now run from Santa Monica, has spent nearly a decade building the plumbing that puts stickers inside other people's apps - and in doing so, quietly became a supplier to some of the largest software companies on earth.

The pitch is almost too simple. An app wants stickers. Building a sticker feature means recruiting artists, licensing art, building search, handling 25 languages, and maintaining all of it forever. Or, a developer can add one line of code from Stipop and get a searchable library of more than 150,000 stickers, ready to drop into a chat window, a comment section, a live stream, or a profile. "They can just add a single line of code inside their product and will have a fully customized sticker feature," co-founder and CEO Tony Park has said. Installation takes about a day.

01 / The originThe roommates who kept building

Tony Park and Daniel Cho met as roommates at boarding school, roughly a decade before Stipop existed. That detail matters more than it sounds. Co-founder breakups sink startups; a friendship that predates the company by ten years is a form of insurance. The two started with a consumer product - an iMessage sticker app they ran for about four years - and it taught them the market from the inside. They knew which stickers people actually sent, which artists drew the ones that traveled, and how quickly a good pack could spread.

Park has been candid that starting from South Korea shaped the strategy. The domestic emoticon market was crowded and controlled by a few messaging giants. So instead of fighting for a small home turf, Stipop built for a global catalog from the beginning - sourcing artists across dozens of countries rather than one. That decision looks obvious in hindsight. At the time it was the harder road.

The consumer years were not wasted. Running a sticker app for four years is unglamorous work: you watch retention curves, you notice that a pack drawn in Jakarta behaves differently from one drawn in Berlin, and you learn that the search box matters as much as the art. When people can't find the sticker they want in two seconds, they give up and send a GIF instead. That lived knowledge became the product spec for everything Stipop built later. The founders were not guessing at what a sticker feature should do; they had already run one.

02 / The pivotFrom a store to a supplier

The turning point was a pattern the founders kept noticing: other companies didn't want to buy stickers from Stipop's store, they wanted the store itself. As Park tells it, dozens of companies revealed they needed a sticker API. So Stipop flipped the model. It went from selling stickers to users to selling sticker infrastructure to businesses, launching its B2B API in November 2020. The consumer app had roughly 200,000 users at the time. Walking away from that to serve developers is the kind of decision that reads as clean strategy in a profile and feels like a gamble in the room.

Step 01

Artists publish

5,000+ creators upload packs through Stipop Studio.

Step 02

Library & search

150K stickers, tagged and searchable in 25 languages.

Step 03

One line of code

Developers drop in the SDK; prebuilt UI, ~1 day to install.

Step 04

Inside the app

Stickers live in chats, comments, streams and profiles.

The bet paid off in logos. Stipop stickers surfaced across Google's Gboard, Android Messages and Tenor - a single Google integration reportedly drove around 600 million sticker views in its first month. Microsoft Teams uses Stipop to power sticker search. Canva and Adobe pulled stickers into their design tools. Coca-Cola commissioned a branded collaboration, which also hinted at the revenue model: custom sticker creation for brands, layered on top of API access.

The business model started deliberately cheap. Early API access was free, with a plan to move to freemium - the sort of pricing that lowers the bar for a developer to try it on a Friday afternoon. Revenue came from the edges: branded packs for companies like Coca-Cola, and premium touches such as seasonal collections and curated recommendations. It is a familiar shape for infrastructure companies. Make the base layer nearly free so it spreads, then charge for the things that only matter once a customer is already committed. The smaller customers were not just revenue; they were proof, the kind a Microsoft or a Google wants to see before wiring anything in.

03 / The numbersWhy apps bother with stickers

The case for stickers isn't sentimental, it's about engagement. Stipop has cited apps seeing usage climb by up to 17% after adding stickers, and roughly 40% eight-week retention among sticker end-users. Those are the metrics that make a product manager say yes. Stickers are a small feature that nudges a real number.

Where Stipop stickers show up

Google Tenor

600M views/mo

Chat apps

engagement +17%

Comments

retention 40%

Profiles

e.g. TripTime

Live streams

e.g. Blabla

04 / The moatWhat is hard to copy here

The obvious competitors are the GIF providers - Google's Tenor and GIPHY - and the temptation for any big app to just build stickers in-house. Stipop's answer is breadth and language. "No other APIs support multiple languages because they source stickers from local artists only," the founders have argued. A sticker that reads perfectly in Seoul may fall flat in São Paulo. Stipop's catalog spans 35 countries and 25 languages, which is not the sort of thing a competitor assembles over a weekend. The library is the moat, and the library took years and thousands of artists to build.

There is also a quieter advantage in who Stipop serves. Because it sits underneath the apps rather than competing with them, it is not fighting Google or Microsoft for users - it is helping them. That is a comfortable place to stand. A company that builds its own sticker system has to keep maintaining it; a company that uses Stipop gets updates, new artists and new languages without lifting a finger. The switching costs run the other way, too. Once stickers are woven into a product's chat and search, ripping them out to rebuild in-house is rarely worth the trouble.

05 / The mapWhere it sits in the market

Think of Stipop as infrastructure, the same way Twilio is for text messages or Stripe is for payments. It is the layer an app rents instead of building. That framing also explains its accelerator path: Stipop was the first Korean company to complete Snap's Yellow accelerator - which came with $150,000 and a foothold in Los Angeles - before joining Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch. Two accelerators, one on each side of the Pacific, for a company whose whole thesis was going global from a small home market. Its backers include Translink Investment, Strong Ventures and Next Ventures.

06 / The next actPaying the people who draw

More recently Stipop has been leaning toward the people who make the stickers in the first place. The company has framed newer work around helping character-IP creators earn revenue directly from their audiences, alongside AI chat and character sticker products for iMessage, WhatsApp and Telegram. It is a logical extension: Stipop already sits between artists and apps, so it is well placed to also sit between artists and their fans. Whether that becomes the main business or a branch of it is the open question - and the one worth watching.

For now, the through-line holds. Stipop found a behavior people do hundreds of millions of times a day, decided it deserved real infrastructure, and built the boring, useful layer underneath. You will probably never see its name. You have almost certainly used its work.