DigitalOcean , the AI-Native Cloud purpose-built for inference and agentic workloads, introduced three additions to its government management group: Kevin Van Gundy as Chief Income Officer, Leo Leung as Chief Advertising Officer, and Brady Mickelsen as Chief Authorized & Administrative Officer. The appointments come weeks after DigitalOcean unveiled its AI-Native Cloud at Deploy, the corporate’s developer and buyer convention, and positioned the corporate to seize what it sees as a once-in-a-generation shift in how software program is constructed and run.
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The brand new leaders be part of at a second of accelerating momentum. Within the first quarter of 2026, DigitalOcean reported income of $257.9 million, up 22% yr over yr, with AI buyer annual run-rate income (ARR) rising 221% yr over yr to $170 million and ARR from clients spending greater than $1 million rising 179% to $183 million. Notably, 81% of AI buyer ARR in Q1 got here from inference companies and core cloud fairly than bare-metal GPU rental — proof that clients are constructing and scaling full-stack manufacturing AI on the platform.
“This period wants a brand new sort of cloud, designed for AI-native clients. We constructed it — and now we have now the group to win it,” stated Paddy Srinivasan, Chief Government Officer of DigitalOcean. “Kevin, Leo and Brady have scaled category-defining firms, they usually deliver precisely what this chapter calls for: industrial firepower, a pointy market understanding, and operational rigor. They be part of Matt Steinfort, our Chief Monetary Officer, and Vinay Kumar, our Chief Product and Expertise Officer, to finish a management group with a singular imaginative and prescient: supply the brand new era of cloud capabilities and experience to assist each AI-native firm develop quicker and smarter, accelerating the inference and agentic period.”
Constructed for the inference and agentic period
As AI shifts from coaching to inference and from chatbots to autonomous brokers, the infrastructure required compounds — a process that takes roughly 10,000 tokens as a chatbot interplay can exceed a 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 lately launched its AI-Native Cloud to satisfy that second: a five-layer, absolutely built-in stack spanning GPU and CPU infrastructure, core cloud, an inference engine with a policy-aware mannequin router and 70-plus open-source and frontier fashions, information and studying companies, and managed agent orchestration. It was essentially the most important product launch within the firm’s historical past.
Management that’s additive to the technique
Kevin Van Gundy — Chief Income Officer
Van Gundy is a builder of hyper-growth firms. As Chief Working Officer at Vercel, he scaled income greater than 50X and grew the group from fewer than 20 folks to over 450 in 4 years — one of many standout progress runs in developer infrastructure. He joins DigitalOcean from Hypermode, the place he served as Chief Government Officer, and earlier constructed and led go-to-market organizations at AI infrastructure leaders Domino Information Lab, Tray.ai, and Neo4j. He pairs technical fluency with deep relationships throughout the AI-native and developer ecosystems and a confirmed report of turning explosive progress into sturdy income. As Chief Income Officer, Van Gundy will architect the gross sales movement that lands DigitalOcean’s marquee AI-native accounts and expands them on multi-year contracts.
Leo Leung — Chief Advertising Officer
Leung combines deep product instincts from his time in computing and AI infrastructure at Google with senior advertising and marketing management roles at Oracle and EMC beforehand. At Google Cloud, he launched a number of generations of customized AI chips in addition to main inference and agent platforms. At Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), he led all internet, social, gross sales, press, and analyst messaging over eight years, because the unit grew from inception to a $12 billion run fee. This mix of technical depth and positioning experience maps on to DigitalOcean’s mandate: clearly outline the corporate’s place in opposition to the neo-clouds and hyperscalers, speed up outbound engagement with AI-native firms, and scale developer mindshare for the AI-Native Cloud.
Brady Mickelsen — Chief Authorized & Administrative Officer
Mickelsen joins from Tanium, the place he served as Chief Authorized Officer, and beforehand held senior in-house authorized management roles together with SVP, Common Counsel at C3.ai, Chief Authorized Officer at TriNet, and head of company, securities and M&A at Oracle. He’s a seasoned public-company operator with deep industrial and M&A expertise and a command of the governance calls for of a fast-scaling enterprise. As Chief Authorized & Administrative Officer, he’ll lead our authorized, folks and actual property capabilities with built-in, accountable management — offering the governance and operational velocity DigitalOcean wants because it invests to satisfy surging buyer demand.
Collectively, the appointments spherical out an government group constructed to execute a essentially new playbook — industrial attain, sharpened market positioning, and the operational and governance spine to scale responsibly.
“The inference financial system is actual. The demand is actual. And DigitalOcean is constructed for it,” added Srinivasan. “We now have the platform, we have now the group, and we have now the conviction. The subsequent chapter of computing shall be AI-native and open – and it runs on DigitalOcean.”
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