companies

vidIQ

YouTube growth suite with AI-generated titles, thumbnails, tags, and a browser extension for keyword research.

vidIQ was founded in San Francisco in 2012 by Rob Sandie and Todd Troxell, both veterans of the video hosting startup Viddler, along with James Cross. The company raised an early $800K seed backed by Mark Cuban and later a $3.3 million Series A, and has grown into one of the oldest and most widely used YouTube analytics tools on the market, with a team of roughly 120 people. The product is a browser extension and dashboard that sits alongside YouTube Studio, surfacing keyword search volume, competitor tracking, and video SEO scores, plus AI features for generating titles, descriptions, tags, and thumbnail concepts, and an 'AI Coach' that reviews a channel's recent uploads and suggests what to fix. It also does real-time view tracking and outlier detection to flag which of a creator's videos is overperforming. vidIQ competes with TubeBuddy as the default 'serious YouTuber' toolkit, and its longevity means most creator advice threads treat it as a known quantity — for better and worse, given that its billing practices are a recurring complaint in reviews.

Founded

2012

Headquarters

San Francisco, United States

Sector

applications