Imgix YC Application

Summer 2011Active

Imgix went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2011 batch as a B2B company. Below: what the company does, who founded it, and its application to YC, reconstructed question by question in the real YC form.

YC batch: Summer 2011
Industry: B2BInfrastructure
Team size: 34
Status: Active
Launched: 2012

Founders

Chris ZachariasFounder/CEO

What Imgix does

Nobody should have to employ expensive imaging scientists and engineers for their business to get the most out of their visual media. This is where imgix has your back. imgix is a platform for managing, processing, rendering, optimizing, and delivering your existing visual assets so that you can meet the demands of your business and your team can stay focused on what they do best. The business demands on web visual media can blindside even the most hyper-aware content teams and developers. Just to be competitive on the Internet, you need your images to be sized perfectly to every device, served in one of any of a half dozen web formats, optimized to the absolute best perceptual quality while maintaining pinpoint performance, and distributed to wherever your users are, anywhere in the world. And that is just the baseline. Next-level imaging concerns like copyright, licensing, accessibility, moderation, illegal or explicit content, "fake news", and more, can threaten your business at any moment if not handled properly. Get any of these things wrong and you are shedding revenue, ceding ground to competitors, and potentially exposing your business to extreme liability. By working with imgix's powerful APIs, SDKs, user interfaces, and integrations, you can rest assured that any demands on your images and videos will always be met, now and into the future, without you having to invest in building it yourself or patching together a mishmash of open source and third-party technologies. Our platform is designed to ensure that your images are always working for your business and never against it. imgix was launched through the famed Y Combinator accelerator program. Its customers include Google, Lyft, Kickstarter, AirBnb, Coursera, Bonobos, Spotify, Vimeo, Bustle, and many others.

Imgix's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Imgix, Summer 2011 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Imgix

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

The platform for your visual media.

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

We built a platform that manages, processes, renders, optimizes, and delivers images and videos on demand through APIs and integrations. It handles everything from resizing and format conversion to global delivery and compliance at scale, so businesses don't need imaging experts or to cobble together multiple tools.

Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?

We live in San Francisco, CA, and the company will be based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

Being in San Francisco puts us close to potential customers and engineers experienced in web infrastructure, which helps us build and grow faster.

21 more answers in the full application

Founders, Progress, Idea, Equity, Curious, Batch Preference are in the full version. Create a free account to open it in YC Insights, next to every other YC batch.

See full application

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the real Imgix YC application?

No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from Imgix's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like Imgix would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.