The riches to be reaped from a successful internet application became apparent yesterday when it emerged that two founders of YouTube were in line for payouts of more than $300 million (£153 million) after the sale of their video-sharing business to Google.

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, two of YouTube’s three co-founders, owned shares worth about $345 million and $326 million, respectively, at last night’s close. They received 735,319 and 694,087 of the 3.23 million Google shares the internet search engine paid in its $1.65 billion all-stock acquisition of YouTube in October.

But Mr Hurley and Mr Chen, who set up YouTube less than two years ago in a garage with Jawed Karim, are only two among the numerous parties set to reap multimillion-pound windfalls from the sale, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday. In most cases, the investments were nominal by comparison with the likely payouts.

Mr Karim, who left PayPal, eBay’s electronic payment unit along with Mr Hurley and Mr Chen, has 137,443 Google shares that were worth about $64 million at last night’s closing price. Mr Karim has a smaller stake than his co-founders because he left YouTube to study at Stanford University.

But Sequoia Capital, YouTube’s largest investor and an early backer of other runaway successes such as Yahoo! — as well as Google itself — is the biggest winner. The venture capitalist received 941,027 Google shares in return for its stake in YouTube, which cost it about $11.5 million.

Sequoia is expected to keep about a quarter of the profits for itself and return the rest to its investors, which include Oxford University, the Ford Foundation, Brown University and the J Paul Getty Trust.

Julie Supan, a spokeswoman for YouTube, has shares worth $4.8 million, Harvard University’s stake is worth about $18 million and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra has about $800,000 Google shares as a result of the YouTube sale.

YouTube employees will have to wait until their shares are vested, or eligible for sale, before they can cash out.

The website has soared in popularity in recent months and is the world’s most visited video-sharing site by a wide margin. YouTube, which surpassed 20 million users a day in March last year, is trailed by Microsoft, with less than half the number of users.

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