Mux
YC W16San Francisco, US · Founded 2016 · Delaware corporation · 95 employees · Hiring · 17 known investors
Mux provides video infrastructure and API services for developers building video applications. The company offers APIs and tools for video encoding, playback, and performance monitoring.
Also known as Mux, Inc.
Founders & leadership· Y Combinator alumni (W16)
Mux was founded in 2016 by Jon Dahl, Adam Brown, Steve Heffernan, and Matthew McClure.
Board
Investors · 17
.jpeg)
Also in the syndicate · 1
Reported raises · per SEC filings
Form D private placements$165.6M disclosed across 4 of 6 rounds · 2016–2021
▶$96.7MraisedMay 2021 · 20 investors · OtherRule 506(b)
- Daniel LevineDirector
- Kristina ShenDirector
- Steven HeffernanExecutive Officer, Director, Promoter
- Jonathan DahlExecutive Officer, Director, Promoter
- Rick HessDirector
- Offering amount
- $105M
- Amount sold
- $96.7M
- First sale
- Apr 2021
- Incorporated
- Corporation, Delaware
- Federal exemptions
- 06b
▶$36.9MraisedAug 2020 · 17 investors · OtherRule 506(b)
- Steven HeffernanExecutive Officer, Director
- Jonathan DahlExecutive Officer, Director
- Kristina ShenDirector
- Daniel LevineDirector
- Gautam ShahDirector
- Offering amount
- $37M
- Amount sold
- $36.9M
- First sale
- Jul 2020
- Incorporated
- Corporation, Delaware, 2015
- Federal exemptions
- 06b
▶$19.9MraisedJul 2019 · 22 investors · OtherRule 506(b)
- Gautam ShahDirector
- Daniel LevineDirector
- Jonathan DahlExecutive Officer, Director
- Steven HeffernanExecutive Officer, Director
- Offering amount
- $20M
- Amount sold
- $19.9M
- First sale
- Apr 2019
- Incorporated
- Corporation, Delaware, 2015
- Federal exemptions
- 06b
▶$12MraisedJan 2017 · 36 investors · OtherRule 506(b)
- Steven HeffernanDirector
- Daniel LevineDirector
- Jonathan DahlExecutive Officer, Director
- Offering amount
- $12M
- Amount sold
- $12M
- First sale
- Dec 2016
- Incorporated
- Corporation, Delaware, 2015
- Federal exemptions
- 06b
Source: SEC EDGAR Form D. Amounts as filed; amended filings shown once at their latest values.
Company profile
researched Aug 2026Mux is a privately held video technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that sells API-first video infrastructure to software development teams. Its two core products are Mux Video, an API for uploading, encoding, storing, and delivering on-demand and live video, and Mux Data, a quality-of-experience (QoE) analytics platform that instruments video players to measure playback failures, startup time, rebuffering and video quality. Grokipedia additionally describes Mux Live for low-latency live streaming. The company's name is short for "multiplexing," a reference to combining multiple signals into one stream in digital media.
The Mux Video feature set spans direct and pull-based uploads, just-in-time encoding, a smart adaptive bitrate ladder, RTMP and SRT live inputs, instant Live-to-VOD, low-latency live streaming, simulcasting, DRM, signed URLs and playback policies, auto-generated captions and subtitles, thumbnails, GIFs, storyboards, clipping, multi-track audio, 4K, watermarking, MP4 downloads, webhooks, headless CMS integrations and Mux Player for web and mobile. A newer beta layer, Mux Robots, packages AI workflows such as caption translation, summarization, chaptering, content moderation and natural-language question answering about video content, exposed as asynchronous jobs through the same client library.
Mux Data is offered as a separately marketed product at data.mux.com, providing a real-time monitoring dashboard, per-view debugging, alerting, A/B testing of players, CDNs and ad servers, CMCD-based end-to-end visibility, benchmarking against other Mux customers, and "Negative Impact Score" and impact-sorting features for prioritizing fixes. Data is exportable via REST APIs, scheduled CSV exports and integrations with Amazon Kinesis, Google Pub/Sub, Snowflake and BigQuery, which Mux states carry no extra integration fees.
Founding story
Mux was founded in 2015 (Grokipedia notes official establishment in January 2016) by Jon Dahl (CEO), Steve Heffernan (Head of Product), Matthew McClure (Head of Technology & Community) and Adam Brown (CTO). Dahl and Heffernan had previously co-founded Zencoder, a cloud encoding company acquired by Brightcove in 2012; Heffernan created the Video.js open-source HTML5 player, and Brown had built large-scale video streaming, transcoding and 3D rendering cloud systems. The team's Zencoder experience with API-driven encoding shaped Mux's approach of exposing video capability through simple APIs, and the company entered Y Combinator's Winter 2016 batch. Note: internal records list the founding year as 2016 while the public sources here cite 2015.
Business model
Mux sells cloud video infrastructure and analytics as usage-based developer APIs and SDKs rather than a packaged end-user video platform, with self-serve signup alongside enterprise sales (a "Talk to us" / demo motion is present on both the main and Mux Data sites). Self-serve pricing was introduced for Mux Data in April 2017.
Consumption-based pricing across storage, delivery and processing. The company's cost calculator illustrates charges such as roughly $0.004 to store a 1m40s video for one month, about $16 for 72,319 streams of it, and about $0.083 for 10 Mux Robots jobs, offset by a $20 free monthly usage credit; Mux Data analytics is described as included, and Mux states it does not charge extra fees for data export integrations.
Traction
TechCrunch reported that in the year to April 2021 on-demand streaming on Mux grew 300%, live streaming grew 3,700% and revenue quadrupled, with headcount at 80 and plans to reach 200. Coatue cited strong customer retention and expansion at the time of the Series D. Customer references published by Mux include Synthesia's AI video platform, Glassdoor's user-generated video launched in five months, Patreon's native video, and Commerce-UI's Lady Gaga site, which reported a 128% increase in add-to-cart rate and 55% increase in average order value after launch.
Latest developments
Mux is marketing Mux Robots, a beta set of pre-built AI video workflows (caption translation, summarization, chaptering, moderation, visual question answering) alongside its streaming and analytics products, positioning the platform for AI-driven video processing in addition to encoding and delivery.
▸Full profile — market position, technology, go-to-market, geography, history, risks & controversies
Market position
Positioned as a developer-oriented alternative to building video infrastructure in-house or assembling encoding, delivery, player and analytics vendors separately. Mux claims its data platform supports some of the world's largest streaming events at tens of millions of concurrent viewers and offers lower-latency insights than industry alternatives, and it says it introduced industry-first viewer experience scores. TechCrunch reported the company reached unicorn status in 2021 on the thesis that video is becoming a standard component of most software products.
Emphasis on API simplicity and speed to launch ("minutes, not months"), data-driven encoding in which Mux Data telemetry informs renditions, bundled analytics with every Mux video stream, unrestricted data portability without integration fees, and domain credibility from a founding team that built Zencoder and Video.js and runs the Demuxed conference.
Technology
Just-in-time and per-title encoding (a technique the sources compare to Netflix's approach), smart adaptive bitrate ladders, HLS and DASH delivery, LL-HLS low-latency live streaming (as low as four seconds in some configurations), RTMP/SRT ingest, DRM and signed URLs, client-side data SDKs for HTML5, iOS, Android and major OTT platforms, CMCD support for tying player QoE to CDN logs, the Mux Player web component, and AI job APIs for transcription, translation, summarization, chaptering, moderation and visual question answering.
Go-to-market
Developer-led distribution: API-first products with documentation, SDKs, a React/web-component player, framework integrations and a free monthly usage credit for trial, complemented by direct sales contact and demo requests. Community presence is part of the motion — the founding team created and maintains Video.js and organizes Demuxed, described as the largest video-focused developer conference and community.
Software development teams embedding video into their products, spanning websites and e-commerce, AI video platforms, community and user-generated content apps, creator platforms, education, media and OTT streamers. Named customers or references include Robinhood, PBS, ViacomCBS, Equinox Media, VSCO, Funny or Die, Synthesia, Glassdoor, Patreon, Typeform and Commerce-UI (which built Lady Gaga's website on Mux).
Geography
Headquartered in San Francisco, California; job listings reference San Francisco, CA and New York locations. Mux Data offers global CDN and player visibility, but the sources do not detail other offices.
History
After joining Heavybit in May 2016 and Y Combinator's W16 batch, Mux shipped its first product, the Mux Data QoS analytics platform, in August 2016, with early customers including PBS and Funny or Die. Self-serve pricing arrived in April 2017, the same year a $9M Series A led by Accel followed a $2.8M seed. Mux Video was announced in early access on 14 November 2017 and became generally available in 2018, adding per-title encoding; a Live Streaming API followed in September 2018. A $37M Series C in 2020 preceded a $105M Series D led by Coatue in April 2021 at a valuation above $1 billion. Low-latency live streaming using LL-HLS shipped in September 2021, the Mux Player public beta launched in 2022, and the AI-oriented Mux Robots product is currently in beta.
Risks & controversies
No controversies, litigation or regulatory issues are reported in the available sources. A minor data caveat: sources disagree on founding year (2015 per Wikipedia/Grokipedia and TechCrunch versus 2016 in internal records) and on cumulative funding (~$174M per Grokipedia versus $175M reported by TechCrunch in 2021 and a stale $11.8M figure on Wikipedia).
Compiled by commissioned research from 8 cited public sources — announcements, filings, and press listed under research sources below.
Key figures
latest reportedCompany-reported or press-reported figures, each dated to when it was claimed — not independently audited.
Founder mafia
The Mux mafia →7 people who came through Mux went on to found or lead other companies.
Competitors · 5
by search overlap
Companies competing with Mux for the same Google search keywords, organic and paid, via search-intersection analysis.
Timeline · 10
launches, deals, and filingsBeta release of Mux Robots, pre-built AI workflows for video including caption translation, question answering about video content, summarization, content moderation and automatic chaptering, billed per job.
Mux launched the public beta of Mux Player, a web component (<mux-player>) with a React version, offering adaptive streaming, timeline preview thumbnails, configurable poster images and built-in Mux Data instrumentation.
Support for Apple's LL-HLS standard, reducing latency to as low as four seconds in certain configurations, compatible with players such as THEOplayer and JW Player, at no additional cost to existing customers.
Series D led by Coatue with participation from Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Cobalt and Dragoneer; valued the company at more than $1 billion. Proceeds earmarked for headcount growth from 80 to 200 and potential acquisitions.
$105M source ↗
API for scalable live video delivery across web, mobile and TV, with instant streaming availability and instant Live-to-VOD archiving.
API for ingesting, encoding, storing and streaming video, using just-in-time encoding and per-title encoding, delivering HLS/DASH playback URLs; reached general availability in 2018.
Mux introduced self-serve pricing and signup for Mux Data, extending access beyond enterprise customers to individual developers and smaller organizations.
Mux's first product, a quality-of-service analytics platform measuring video performance and viewer experience; early customers included PBS and Funny or Die.
Mux went through the Y Combinator accelerator program in the Winter 2016 batch.
Dated company events from announcements, filings, and press; legal rows summarize public dockets and regulator releases.
Legal entities · 1
corporate structureIn the news
Mux raises $105M, achieves unicorn statustechcrunch.com · Apr 2021
Mux (YC W16) raises $37M Series C as its developer video platform scalestechcrunch.com · Aug 2020
Video is exploding and Mux raises a Series Amux.com · Apr 2017▸Research sources · 8
primary sources listed
- Muxmux.com · web
8 public sources were cited for this profile; the first-party ones are listed here.
Frequently asked questions
- What does Mux do?
- Mux is a San Francisco video technology company selling developer-facing APIs for streaming, video analytics and AI video workflows.
- Who founded Mux?
- Mux was founded by Jon Dahl, Adam Brown, Steve Heffernan, Matthew McClure in 2016.
- Who are Mux's investors?
- Mux's investors include Accel, Advancit Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Aurum Venture Partners, Coatue Management, Heavybit, HubSpot Ventures, Mango Capital and 8 more.
- How much funding has Mux raised?
- Mux has disclosed $165.6M raised across 4 of its 6 known rounds.
- Where is Mux headquartered?
- Mux is headquartered in San Francisco, US.