DigitalOcean Adds Three Executives to Power the Next Chapter of Growth as AI-Native Demand Accelerates

Kevin Van Gundy, Leo Leung, and Brady Mickelsen join the leadership team as the company scales the first full-stack cloud purpose-built for the inference and agentic era.

DigitalOcean (NYSE:DOCN), the AI-Native Cloud purpose-built for inference and agentic workloads, today announced three additions to its executive leadership team: Kevin Van Gundy as Chief Revenue Officer, Leo Leung as Chief Marketing Officer, and Brady Mickelsen as Chief Legal & Administrative Officer. The appointments come weeks after DigitalOcean unveiled its AI-Native Cloud at Deploy, the company's developer and customer conference, and positioned the company to capture what it sees as a once-in-a-generation shift in how software is built and run.

The new leaders join at a moment of accelerating momentum. In the first quarter of 2026, DigitalOcean reported revenue of $257.9 million, up 22% year over year, with AI customer annual run-rate revenue (ARR) growing 221% year over year to $170 million and ARR from customers spending more than $1 million growing 179% to $183 million. Notably, 81% of AI customer ARR in Q1 came from inference services and core cloud rather than bare-metal GPU rental — evidence that customers are building and scaling full-stack production AI on the platform.

"This era needs a new type of cloud, designed for AI-native customers. We built it — and now we have the team to win it," said Paddy Srinivasan, Chief Executive Officer of DigitalOcean. "Kevin, Leo and Brady have scaled category-defining companies, and they bring exactly what this chapter demands: commercial firepower, a sharp market understanding, and operational rigor. They join Matt Steinfort, our Chief Financial Officer, and Vinay Kumar, our Chief Product and Technology Officer, to complete a leadership team with a singular vision: offer the new generation of cloud capabilities and expertise to help every AI-native company grow faster and smarter, accelerating the inference and agentic era."

Built for the inference and agentic era

As AI shifts from training to inference and from chatbots to autonomous agents, the infrastructure required compounds — a task that takes roughly 10,000 tokens as a chatbot interaction can exceed one million tokens when an agentic system handles it end-to-end, and most of that work is CPU-based orchestration, not GPU inference alone. DigitalOcean recently introduced its AI-Native Cloud to meet that moment: a five-layer, fully integrated stack spanning GPU and CPU infrastructure, core cloud, an inference engine with a policy-aware model router and 70-plus open-source and frontier models, data and learning services, and managed agent orchestration. It was the most significant product launch in the company's history.

Leadership that is additive to the strategy

Kevin Van Gundy — Chief Revenue Officer

Van Gundy is a builder of hyper-growth companies. As Chief Operating Officer at Vercel, he scaled revenue more than 50X and grew the team from fewer than 20 people to over 450 in four years — one of the standout growth runs in developer infrastructure. He joins DigitalOcean from Hypermode, where he served as Chief Executive Officer, and earlier built and led go-to-market organizations at AI infrastructure leaders Domino Data Lab, Tray.ai, and Neo4j. He pairs technical fluency with deep relationships across the AI-native and developer ecosystems and a proven record of turning explosive growth into durable revenue. As Chief Revenue Officer, Van Gundy will architect the sales motion that lands DigitalOcean's marquee AI-native accounts and expands them on multi-year contracts.

Leo Leung — Chief Marketing Officer

Leung combines deep product instincts from his time in computing and AI infrastructure at Google with senior marketing leadership roles at Oracle and EMC previously. At Google Cloud, he launched multiple generations of custom AI chips as well as leading inference and agent platforms. At Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), he led all web, social, sales, press, and analyst messaging over eight years, as the unit grew from inception to a $12 billion run rate. This blend of technical depth and positioning expertise maps directly to DigitalOcean's mandate: clearly define the company's position against the neo-clouds and hyperscalers, accelerate outbound engagement with AI-native companies, and scale developer mindshare for the AI-Native Cloud.

Brady Mickelsen — Chief Legal & Administrative Officer

Mickelsen joins from Tanium, where he served as Chief Legal Officer, and previously held senior in-house legal leadership roles including SVP, General Counsel at C3.ai, Chief Legal Officer at TriNet, and head of corporate, securities and M&A at Oracle. He is a seasoned public-company operator with deep commercial and M&A experience and a command of the governance demands of a fast-scaling business. As Chief Legal & Administrative Officer, he will lead our legal, people and real estate functions with integrated, accountable leadership — providing the governance and operational velocity DigitalOcean needs as it invests to meet surging customer demand.

Together, the appointments round out an executive team built to execute a fundamentally new playbook — commercial reach, sharpened market positioning, and the operational and governance backbone to scale responsibly.

"The inference economy is real. The demand is real. And DigitalOcean is built for it," added Srinivasan. "We have the platform, we have the team, and we have the conviction. The next chapter of computing will be AI-native and open - and it runs on DigitalOcean."

About DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is the AI-Native Cloud purpose-built for the inference and agentic era. Its five-layer integrated platform - spanning GPU and CPU infrastructure, core cloud, inference, data, and managed agent orchestration - is open throughout with no vendor lock-in, giving builders everything they need to start fast, scale production AI workloads, and improve unit economics. More than 650,000 customers and millions of developers globally trust DigitalOcean to build, ship, and scale their applications. Learn more at digitalocean.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including statements regarding DigitalOcean's strategy, market opportunity, product capabilities, competitive position, leadership team, capacity expansion, and financial outlook. These statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including those described in DigitalOcean's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date hereof, and DigitalOcean undertakes no obligation to update them except as required by law.

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