Over 1,500 people have contributed to the Zulip codebase, from high school students to 30 year industry veterans, from people launching new careers to people looking for community. Meet the team below!

The Zulip Foundation

Zulip is stewarded by the Zulip Foundation, with a mission of developing the best possible team chat experience, with a particular focus on public-interest organizations and communities. The Zulip Foundation fully owns Kandra Labs, the company responsible for hosting, supporting, and improving Zulip for use across all industries.

Board of Directors

• Tim Abbott, Zulip’s founder, and project leader from 2015 to May 2026.
• Greg Price, Zulip's long-time mobile team lead, who had a cofounder-like role from 2017 to May 2026.
• Alya Abbott, Zulip’s long-time product lead, who had a cofounder-like role from 2021 to May 2026.
• Josh Triplett, a leader in the Rust programming language, experienced in open source, and a major advocate for Zulip.
• Hazel Weakly, a former Director of the Haskell Foundation Board, open source and community advocate, and a Fellow of the Nivenly Foundation.

Advisory Board

• Jeremy Avigad, a Professor of Philosophy and Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University and Director of the NSF Institute for Computer-Aided Reasoning in Mathematics. He is a founding member of the Lean Community organization, for which Zulip has hosted more than two million messages to date.
• Nick Bergson-Shilcock, the CEO and cofounder of the Recurse Center, a programming retreat based in New 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 mentor for Zulip's Google Summer of Code program since 2018.
• Nicole Foster, a Director of Operations at NumFOCUS, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit supporting open source scientific computing projects and communities.
• Andrew Sutherland, mathematician and senior researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and President of the Number Theory Foundation. He is a leading advocate of Zulip for research collaborations, including the L-functions and Modular Forms Database.
• Alex Vandiver, who led Zulip's infrastructure team from 2020 to May 2026.
• Theo Wait, the Director of Operations at Lichess.org, who helped the project grow from a small hobby site to a French non-profit with 10 million monthly active users. Formerly from a UK legal background, with interests across data protection, financial regulation, charities, and intellectual property.

The core team

The Kandra Labs team is a group of amazing people who have numerous years of professional experience working on Zulip, and tens of thousands of Zulip commits between them. They frequently ship major improvements end-to-end across every facet of the product.

Zulip’s strength is its culture and incredibly disciplined development process. If that sounds exciting, take a look at our job openings!

Our amazing community

While the team at Kandra Labs provides important leadership, Zulip is built by an incredible distributed community of developers from all around the world. You can read about the project's history if you want to learn more about Zulip's origins.

Here, we recognize the top contributors to the Zulip project on GitHub. Zulip's community is unusual in how many people outside the core team have made major contributions to the project.

Last updated: 2026-10-23. Methodology.