Announcing the Zulip Foundation Announcements<br>Announcing the Zulip Foundation<br>Tim Abbott May 15, 2026 • 9 min read<br>Today marks a major transition for the Zulip open-source project and for Kandra<br>Labs, the company behind it: I’m stepping back from full-time Zulip leadership<br>to join Anthropic, alongside three senior team members, and we’re donating the<br>company to a newly created, independent, nonprofit Zulip Foundation. The new<br>structure provides stability, a renewed commitment to our values, and<br>opportunities for charitable fundraising to support our mission. This blog post<br>explains these changes and why they set Zulip up for greater long-term success.
Zulip is a beloved organized team chat product, used by thousands of companies,<br>open-source projects, and research communities. Zulip is known for its unique<br>topic-based threading model, which makes it easy to have many conversations in<br>parallel without chaos, interruptions, or stress.<br>April’s Zulip 12.0 release<br>included almost 5,500 commits contributed by 160 people from all around the<br>world.
Zulip’s new ownership and governance structure
The Zulip Foundation will be the formal steward of the Zulip project, with a<br>mission of developing the best possible team chat experience, with a particular<br>focus on public-interest organizations and communities.
Kandra Labs, the company that has stewarded Zulip<br>for the last decade, will<br>now be fully and independently owned by the Zulip Foundation, with no other<br>stockholders or debt obligations. Kandra Labs will continue hosting, supporting,<br>and improving Zulip for use across all industries, offering an excellent<br>experience for business customers. We’re committed to being a trustworthy,<br>transparent vendor for our customers, and anticipate no major changes in how we<br>conduct business.
I’m excited that this new structure — similar to governance structures for<br>Mozilla, Signal, and Wikipedia — formalizes our<br>longtime commitment<br>to Zulip’s sustainability and independence.
The foundation’s initial board of directors will be:
Tim Abbott, Zulip’s founder (me).
Greg Price, who has helped me lead Zulip in a cofounder-like role for the last<br>9 years.
Alya Abbott, Zulip’s product lead, who has also held a cofounder-like role for<br>the last 5 years.
Josh Triplett, a leader in the Rust programming language, experienced in open<br>source, and a major advocate for<br>Zulip.
We also have five incredible people signed on to share their expertise as<br>members of an advisory board:
Andrew Sutherland, mathematician and senior researcher at the Massachusetts<br>Institute of Technology, and President of the Number Theory Foundation. He is<br>a leading advocate of Zulip for research collaborations, including the<br>L-functions and Modular Forms Database.
Hazel Weakly, a former Director of the<br>Haskell Foundation Board, open source and<br>community advocate, and a Fellow of the<br>Nivenly Foundation.
Jeremy Avigad, a Professor of Philosophy and Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie<br>Mellon University and Director of the NSF Institute for Computer-Aided<br>Reasoning in Mathematics. He is a founding member of the<br>Lean Community organization, for which<br>Zulip has hosted more than two million messages to date.
Nick Bergson-Shilcock, the CEO and cofounder of the<br>Recurse Center, a programming retreat based in New<br>York whose community of 3,000+ alums has run on Zulip since 2013.
Puneeth Chaganti, an OCaml developer working on core ecosystem tooling, and a<br>mentor for Zulip’s Google Summer of Code program since 2018.
I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has volunteered to help launch the Zulip<br>Foundation. We’re looking to recruit one additional director, and to fill out a<br>larger advisory board. If you or someone you know may be a good fit, please<br>reach out to foundation-jobs@zulip.com to<br>let us know!
If you’d like to follow along, please<br>sign up for<br>occasional email updates from the Zulip Foundation.
Stability during the leadership transition
Zulip’s operations will continue without interruption, including Zulip Cloud;<br>the Mobile Push Notifications Service and support contracts for self-hosted<br>organizations; our Google Summer of Code mentorship program, with 11<br>participants this summer; and our sponsorships for the thousands of open-source<br>projects and other public-interest organizations that Zulip Cloud hosts free of<br>charge.
Kim Vandiver, an<br>experienced leader and operator, has joined Kandra Labs as Interim President to<br>help ensure a smooth transition. This is not the first time Kim has raised her<br>hand to help a values-focused organization in a time of change:<br>at VaccinateCA, a<br>rapidly evolving COVID-era effort to spread information about vaccines, Kim<br>jumped in to revamp a variety of processes — first as a volunteer, and then as<br>the Director of Operations. I’m extremely grateful to have her here to manage<br>operations and help run a global search for the best possible leadership for<br>Zulip going forward.
Operationally, both Zulip Cloud and the self-hosted experience are...