DigitalOcean Holdings Inc., a cloud provider targeting developers and startups, has appointed Vinay Kumar as its first Chief Product and Technology Officer, a move aimed at accelerating its expansion into production-grade AI inference amid intensifying competition from hyperscalers.

The announcement, made on January 20, 2026, positions Mr. Kumar to oversee product strategy, development, cloud infrastructure, and security while executing the company’s platform roadmap, particularly as it scales AI inference capabilities alongside core cloud services, according to a Business Wire press release.

“Vinay has built cloud and AI platforms at scale, has tremendous product strategy acumen, understands the operational rigor required for mission-critical workloads, brings a strong track record of disciplined product execution, and will elevate our product and technology leadership,” said Paddy Srinivasan, chief executive of DigitalOcean, in the release.

From OCI Founding Member to DigitalOcean Leader

Mr. Kumar brings over a decade of experience scaling hyperscale clouds. He was a founding member of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure starting in 2015, leading multidisciplinary product and engineering teams in Seattle to deliver foundational services with high reliability and performance essential for AI workloads, per the Business Wire release and his Oracle executive biography.

At Oracle, as senior vice president of North America cloud solutions engineering, he accelerated cloud adoption through engineering, customer engagement, and product leadership, including integrations with HashiCorp, Microsoft, and VMware. Earlier, he led product management for AWS storage services like Elastic Block Store and Simple Storage Service, and held roles at Akamai and EMC (now Dell), providing deep expertise in distributed systems, as detailed in the LinkedIn profile and Oracle bio.

“Digital and AI natives building on DigitalOcean are developing disruptive, AI-propelled products. This success clearly underscores our opportunity to deliver an AI inference cloud, purpose-built for their needs,” Mr. Kumar said in the release. “I’m excited to work with the team to advance the platform, solidify our infrastructure and security posture, and accelerate the execution that will drive real-world AI applications at scale.”

AI Inference as Core Growth Driver

DigitalOcean, serving over 640,000 customers with a focus on simplicity and cost efficiency, has gained traction among digital-native enterprises and AI startups running production inference workloads. The company recently demonstrated its Inference Cloud Platform, powered by AMD Instinct GPUs, delivering 2X production inference throughput for Character.ai—handling over a billion daily queries—while cutting cost per token by 50% versus non-optimized GPUs, according to an investor release.

“By migrating these workloads to DigitalOcean’s inference cloud platform, Character.ai achieved significantly higher request throughput while adhering to rigorous latency targets,” the release stated. Optimizations included ROCm with vLLM, AMD’s AITER runtime, and hardware-aware scheduling on MI300X and MI325X GPUs. David Brinker, senior vice president of partnerships at Character.ai, noted the results exceeded expectations.

In December 2025, DigitalOcean inked a multi-year, eight-figure annual deal with Persistent Systems, making it the exclusive provider for SASVA, Persistent’s AI platform leveraging DigitalOcean’s Gradient AI for agent development and GPUs, as reported by Persistent Systems.

Financial Momentum Fuels Expansion

These wins follow Q3 2025 results where revenue hit $230 million, up 16% year-over-year—the strongest growth since Q3 2023—with record $44 million incremental organic ARR. Direct AI revenue more than doubled for the fifth straight quarter, customers over $100,000 ARR grew 41% to 26% of revenue, and $1 million+ ARR clients exceeded $100 million growing 72%, per the earnings release.

DigitalOcean raised 2025 revenue guidance to $896-$897 million (15% growth), adjusted EBITDA margin to 41%, and adjusted free cash flow margin to 18-19%. Momentum from post-Q3 eight-figure contracts prompted lifting 2026 outlook to hit 18-20% growth a year early, CEO Srinivasan said on the earnings call.

The company secured 30 megawatts of new data center capacity for 2026 to support AI demand and refinanced 2026 convertible notes, bolstering its balance sheet while repurchasing shares.

Strategic Bet on Developer-Friendly AI Cloud

Unlike hyperscalers burdened by legacy enterprise deals, DigitalOcean’s developer-centric model—emphasizing predictable pricing and ease—positions it for AI-native firms shunning complexity. Mr. Kumar’s hyperscale pedigree will fortify infrastructure resilience and security, critical as inference shifts from experimentation to production, analysts note in Simply Wall St coverage.

Recent X posts from DigitalOcean and board member Warren Adelman welcomed Mr. Kumar, highlighting his role in building the “Inference Cloud for running AI reliably in production,” echoing the company’s account.

For industry insiders, this hire signals DigitalOcean’s ambition to capture share in the $100 billion+ AI infrastructure market by blending OCI-scale execution with startup agility, potentially driving NDR above 99% as AI workloads scale.