Founded in 2007 by Jonathan Dahl,[1] and built by Slantwise Design and Sevenwire,[2] Zencoder is a distributed multimedia processing system for websites that allow users to upload video.[1] Zencoder was built with Ruby on Rails and provides a REST API for creating new transcoding jobs.[1] It utilizes the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud to provide a scalable transcoding system.[3]
Zencoder announced it has raised $2 million[4] for its cloud-based service that lets users get their videos ready for presentation and delivery via web or mobile apps. Investors in this round include Andreessen-Horowitz, Ignition Partners, SV Angels, Lowercase Capital, Founder’s Collective, 500 Startups, and individual investors such as Matt Cutts, James Lindenbaum, Orion Henry, Adam Wiggins, Wolfgang Buehler, Mike Bollinger and Neil McClements.
In 2008, Zencoder partnered with On2 Technologies to create Flix Cloud, an online video encoding service.[5] Flix Cloud combined On2's Flix Engine encoding software with Zencoder's web application.[6] Flix Cloud officially launched in April, 2009 after a brief beta testing period where it provided free transcoding for all customers.[6]