image-optimization
(2)
Cloudinary built a business on the image nobody wants to resize
Every beautiful website has an unglamorous back room. Cloudinary turned that room into a service, then grew to $100 million in annual recurring revenue before Blackstone bought a stake.
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.