The story
The company was started in 2009 in Athens, Ohio, as Alan Schaaf's side project while he attended Ohio University for computer science. Imgur was created as a response to the usability problems and lack of file retention encountered on reddit. Its launch was announced in a reddit post in February 2009, and reached "a million total page views in the first five months." In October 2012, Imgur expanded its functionality to allow users to directly share images to Imgur instead of requiring images to gain enough attraction through other social media sites like Reddit to show up on the popular image gallery.
Display ads were introduced in May 2009; sponsored images and self-service ads were introduced in 2013.
Imgur used three different hosting providers in the first year before settling on Voxel, then switching to Amazon Web Services in late 2011.
In January 2011, the company moved from Ohio to San Francisco. In June 2013 it had 10 employees, and won the Best Bootstrapped Startup award at TechCrunch's 2012 Crunchies Awards.
In 2016, Reddit introduced native image hosting, causing a notable decrease in Imgur submissions on the site.
On September 27, 2021, Imgur announced that they were acquired by MediaLab AI, Inc., a holding company of internet brands. Shortly after in January, 2022, Alan Schaaf left the company.
On April 19, 2023, Imgur changed their terms of service and announced that they would delete inactive content that was not tied to an account, as well as pornography and sexually explicit content, from their servers. The new terms went into effect on May 15, 2023. The move drew significant criticism, as removing archived images would compound the challenge of link rot that other photo services have also faced. The move also followed a similar move by Tumblr in late 2018. Some also saw it as a response to pressure to push sex workers off internet services.
On September 30, 2025, Imgur blocked users from the United Kingdom in response to a potential fine from the Information Commissioner's Office regarding its handling of children's personal data.
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Funding
In April 2014, five years after it was founded, Imgur raised $40 million (USD) from Andreessen Horowitz and Andreessen Horowitz's Lars Dalgaard joined Imgur's board. Imgur was profitable at the time, generating revenue from Pro subscriptions and advertising.
In February 2019, Imgur received $20 million (USD) from Stefan Thomas (ex-Ripple CTO).
2017 data breach
On November 23, 2017, Imgur was notified of a potential security breach that had occurred in 2014 and affected the email addresses and passwords of 1.7 million user accounts. On November 24, Imgur began notifying affected users via their registered email address to change their passwords.
From Wikipedia’s article on Imgur, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.6