Open source pioneer and serial founder brings deep developer community roots and infrastructure expertise to Vercel’s board

Vercel, the agentic infrastructure company, today announced the appointment of Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp and creator of industry-defining open source tools including Terraform and Vagrant, to its board of directors. Hashimoto brings a rare combination of developer community credibility, open source leadership, and company-building experience at scale.

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Guillermo Rauch, Mitchell Hashimoto, and Tom Occhino

Hashimoto co-founded HashiCorp in 2012, where he served as a principal architect and engineering leader behind some of the most widely adopted infrastructure tools in the world. Terraform, which he created, has become the de facto standard for infrastructure-as-code and is used by organizations of every scale, including Vercel itself. IBM acquired HashiCorp in 2024 in a transaction valued at approximately $6.4 billion. After departing HashiCorp, Hashimoto launched Ghostty, a GPU-accelerated, platform-native terminal emulator that quickly became a market leader among AI developers since its public release in December 2024.

“Mitchell is inimitable as an advisor: he’s built tools that nearly every developer uses, grown a company to a multi-billion dollar outcome, and then stepped back into the arena as a builder,” said Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel. “He has been a Vercel customer and Next.js user since our earliest days. There aren’t many people who understand our mission more, and we’re honored to have him on the board.”

Hashimoto also cited his long personal history with Vercel’s products as a key reason for joining the board. He joins at a moment of significant momentum for Vercel, following its $300 million Series F fundraise at a $9.3 billion valuation, and as reflected in the company’s $340M GAAP Revenue run-rate and 84% YoY growth.

“Vercel checks every box for what I care most about: a powerful developer presence, industry-defining products, and a team building for our agentic future,” said Hashimoto. “I’ve watched Vercel grow from the perspective of a founder, an engineer, and a customer, and I’m excited to help in every way I can as they build the agentic infrastructure for frontends, backends, and agents.”

Hashimoto is one of the most recognized figures in the open source community, consistently ranked among the most active contributors on GitHub globally over more than a decade. His work has shaped how developers build, deploy, and operate software at every layer of the stack. He has also been a committed advocate for open source sustainability, making significant philanthropic contributions to projects including the Zig programming language.

“Mitchell understands something that is easy to say but hard to actually do: winning developers means earning their trust over many years through great software,” said Tom Occhino, Chief Product Officer at Vercel. “He built the tools that helped define modern infrastructure by making them genuinely excellent, not by locking anyone in. That philosophy is deeply aligned with how we think about Vercel’s role in the ecosystem.”

Hashimoto joins a distinguished group of board members and advisors supporting Vercel’s mission to enable the world to build with the speed, security, and scalability required to win with AI, including Stripe CFO Steffan Tomlinson and Susan St. Ledger, former President of Worldwide Field Operations at HashiCorp.

About Vercel

Vercel is the agentic infrastructure for every app and agent. As the team behind AI SDK, Next.js, and v0, Vercel is the platform where humans and agents build and deploy software, while infrastructure improves it autonomously. To ship for the AI-native web, visit vercel.com

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“Vercel checks every box for what I care most about: a powerful developer presence, industry-defining products, and a team building for our agentic future."