ShortPixel, a Romanian service provider that helps web developers, bloggers and online companies to improve the speed and performance of their websites, with today over 300,000 active users and around 1 million supported websites, acquires ReSmush.it, a major provider of image optimization tools.
The company that owns the ShortPixel brand, ID Scout, founded exactly ten years ago, in 2014, by Simion Duduica and Alexandru Florescu, had in 2022 business of 4.7 million lei and a net profit of 3 million lei, with only 2 employees. To date it has surpassed 12 billion optimized images for over 500,000 clients.
reSmush.it was launched in 2008 by Stoyan Stefanov (10 years engineer at Facebook) and Nicole Sullivan (ex-developer at Yahoo) at the Ajax Experience conference in Boston, marking the beginning of a significant advance in web image optimization.
“Back in 2015, I was a daily user of Yahoo Smush.it for all my projects, and Image optimization was more and more considered. I seized the opportunity of the sudden shutdown of this service to provide a similar service, coded within a few days. A week after the shutdown, I provided to the community reSmush.it, and within a few days, it became very popular, beyond my expectations! In less than a month, it was optimizing 1 million pictures a day!”
“I felt very proud when I realized that US universities were using reSmush.it. So I decided to continue the expansion by helping the community by creating plugins for the most popular tools. Based on a personal need, it was very rewarding to see how popular this service was”, explained Charles Bourgeaux, former owner of reSmush.it.
The plan of the Romanians is now to keep the program free, but also to improve it and add some paid options, at affordable prices, for the latest image formats, with the aim of positioning reSmush.it as the main solution for optimizing an image.
“reSmush.it is an important player in the image optimization space, and it is the only truly free such service. Its API is used by other large WP plugins, and also by many other smaller solutions that cater for Prestashop, Drupal, and other such CMSes. We plan on keeping it free, but also improving it and adding some affordable paid options for next-gen image formats. Our mission with reSmush.it is to be the go-to free image optimization solution for any CMS.” said Alex Florescu, founder of ShortPixel.com, quoted by finance.yahoo.com.