Pixelapse bet designers wanted GitHub-style version control; Dropbox acquired it in 2015

Pixelapse started in 2011 when Min Ming Lo and Shravan Reddy noticed designers lacked the structured collaboration tools programmers had built with CVS, SVN and git. Lo, who had worked on design at Google, had seen assets kept in one massive shared folder with names like app_icon_version_2_final_final_final.psd; Reddy, a developer, had manually exported each PSD asset at many sizes just to commit it. Their bet: designers would adopt version control and collaborative review if it came as an automatic, visual tool.

The company moved into FirstFloor Labs in October 2011, wrote its first code that month, and was accepted into Y Combinator on 2011-11-16. A Show HN sneak peek on 2012-02-09 drew 409 points and a wave of signups; YC Demo Day followed in March 2012, and a seed round closed 2012-06-01 with investors including Spark Capital, Salesforce, Zynga, Gusto, Google, YC, a16z, Start Fund and SV Angel. The first paying customer came on 2013-01-01; TechCrunch covered the full launch on 2013-02-13, reporting over half a million hosted image revisions and a user base in the thousands.

Pixelapse kept widening the bet — a Teams product in June 2013, a BOLD design-culture site in May 2014, and an Open Design Movement arguing that design is fundamentally collaborative. On 2015-01-26 Dropbox acquired the company; the founders said the goal was to bring the same collaboration experiences to Dropbox for millions of users. New signups ceased on 2016-08-03 and the standalone product sunset on 2016-11-01, after Dropbox had shipped comments, previews and annotations built on the same vision.