A bootstrapped host from Chicago spent 13 years betting that real humans and owned hardware beat cheap resellers and chatbots. In 2023 private equity agreed - to the tune of roughly $19 million.
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.

Addy Osmani is an Irish software engineer and engineering leader who spent nearly 14 years shaping the modern web at Google Chrome - leading the teams behind Lighthouse, Core Web Vitals, Chrome DevTools, Puppeteer, and PageSpeed Insights. Now Director at Google Cloud AI, he bridges Gemini, Vertex AI, and the Agent Development Kit for millions of developers worldwide. Author of multiple O'Reilly books and curator of the Elevate newsletter, Osmani's work has touched over 20 million developers and his open-source projects have become industry standards.