# imgix

> imgix is a San Francisco-based visual media platform that optimizes, transforms, and delivers images and video in real time through a simple URL-based API. Founded in 2011 by former YouTube web developer Chris Zacharias, imgix lets developers resize, crop, compress, convert formats, and now apply AI edits such as background removal and generative fill simply by appending parameters to an image URL, offloading image infrastructure to a globally distributed CDN. The company serves tens of thousands of customers, including Unsplash, Kickstarter, Eventbrite, and Porsche, and delivers on the order of billions of image requests a day.

- **Founded:** 2011
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founders:** Chris Zacharias (Founder & CEO)
- **Team size:** Roughly 40-50 employees; distributed across the US, Canada, Germany, and Japan
- **Products:** Image API / Rendering, Asset Management, AI Visual Tools, imgix Video
- **Notable:** Powers image delivery for Unsplash, which scaled from 20M to 350M images/month on the platform, Serves over 1.4 billion images per month for Kickstarter from single origin files, Delivers on the order of billions of image requests daily across its customer base

## Products & services

- **Image API / Rendering** — Real-time image resizing, cropping, compression, and format conversion via URL parameters, delivered over a global CDN.
- **Asset Management** — Dashboard and API for organizing, searching, and managing source images and media assets.
- **AI Visual Tools** — Background removal, object removal, generative fill, text-to-image, and super-resolution upscaling applied through the same URL API.
- **imgix Video** — Video optimization, encoding, adaptive delivery, smart cropping, watermarking, auto-generated previews, image-to-video, and multi-language captions.

## Achievements

- Powers image delivery for Unsplash, which scaled from 20M to 350M images/month on the platform
- Serves over 1.4 billion images per month for Kickstarter from single origin files
- Delivers on the order of billions of image requests daily across its customer base
- Y Combinator-backed; grew from a living-room project to infrastructure under thousands of sites
- Expanded from images into full video optimization and AI editing while keeping a single URL-based API

## Latest updates

- **2026-Q2** — Q2 2026 release: auto-generated video previews, image-to-video, and captions generated from audio and translated into nearly 100 languages, all controlled from the URL.
- **2025-Q4** — Q4 2025 release expanded imgix Video with auto-generated previews, watermarking, smart cropping, and image-to-video.
- **2025-Q2** — Launched imgix Video and made text-to-image generally available on the platform.
- **2023** — Introduced AI-powered tools including background removal, object removal, and generative fill via the image API.

## Links

- Website: https://imgix.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/imgix
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/imgix
- GitHub: https://github.com/imgix
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/imgix

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/imgix
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-11