Company

The performance leader in cloud-based encoding.

Zencoder (www.zencoder.com) is the leader in cloud-based video encoding, with the fastest and most widely used solution in the market. Founded in 2010, its products enable content providers to quickly deploy Internet video to virtually any Internet connected device. The team’s technology vision dates back to 2008 when the team pioneered cloud-based encoding as a service with On2 Technologies (now Google). Zencoder was founded by Jon Dahl, Brandon Arbini, and Steve Heffernan, a team of engineers intent on removing the complexities of putting video online and committed to making scalable, high-performance video encoding available to developers and businesses everywhere.

History

Zencoder launched in 2010 to solve the most complex part of the video publishing process: transcoding. Every video published, anywhere, needs to be transcoded (or encoded). But for many years, transcoding technology was unreliable, slow, and difficult to work with. Zencoder was founded to solve this problem.

Zencoder launched in May of 2010 after participating in the Y Combinator startup accelerator. Based on four years of experience building scalable, high performance video encoding infrastructure, Zencoder became the highest performance video encoding service available. Zencoder uses the fastest servers in the cloud, the most advanced scalability technology, and a toolbox of the best open source and commercial transcoding software that ensure the highest quality for every video.

Before that, Zencoder partnered in 2008 with On2 Technologies (creator of the VP6 video codec) to build Flix Cloud, a pioneering cloud-based video transcoding service. Flix Cloud serviced hundreds of customers encoded millions of videos in its lifetime. Google bought On2 in 2010 and used On2’s VP8 video codec as the foundation for its open-source WebM video format, and Flix Cloud was shut down in November of 2010.

Investors

Zencoder is backed by some of the top investors in the world, including five of the top ten angel investors in the US according to Business Week. Investors include Y Combinator, Chris Sacca/Lowercase Capital, Dave McClure/500 Startups, Ron Conway/SV Angel, Founder’s Collective, Andreessen-Horowitz, Ignition Partners, Matt Cutts, Neil McClements/Fintech Ventures, Wolfgang Buehler, Steven Grimm, Ash Patel, Robert and Ryan Weber, and Justin Yoshimura.