Vercel Appoints Mitchell Hashimoto, Co-Founder of HashiCorp and Creator of Terraform, to Its Board of Directors
Pioneer of open-source software and serial founder brings a wealth of experience from involvement in the developer community and expertise in infrastructure to Vercel’s board of directors.
San Francisco–(ANTARA/Business Wire)–Vercel, an agent-based infrastructure company, today announced the appointment of Mitchell Hashimoto to its board of directors. Hashimoto is a co-founder of HashiCorp and the creator of industry-defining open-source tools including Terraform and Vagrant. He possesses a rare combination of developer community credibility, open-source leadership, and experience in building large-scale companies.
Hashimoto co-founded HashiCorp in 2012, where he served as the chief architect and engineering leader behind some of the world’s most widely used infrastructure tools. The Terraform tool he created has become the de facto standard for infrastructure as code and is used by organisations of all sizes, including Vercel itself. IBM acquired HashiCorp in 2024 in a transaction valued at approximately $6.4 billion. After leaving HashiCorp, Hashimoto launched Ghostty, a platform-based, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator. This emulator has quickly become a leader in the market among AI developers since its public release in December 2024.
“Mitchell is an unparalleled advisor: he has developed a number of tools used by nearly every developer, grown a company to billions in value, and then returned to the world of development as a builder,” said Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel. “He has been a Vercel customer and Next.js user since the early days of our company. Few people understand our mission better, and it is an honour for us to have him on our board of directors.”
Hashimoto also noted that his extensive experience using Vercel’s products was a primary reason for joining the board. He joins at a time when Vercel is experiencing significant momentum, following a $300 million Series F funding round with a $9.3 billion valuation. This is reflected in the company’s GAAP revenue run rate of $340 million and 84% annual growth.
“Vercel ticks all the boxes that matter most to me: a strong developer presence, industry-defining products, and a team building the agent-based future,” said Hashimoto. “I have witnessed Vercel’s growth from the perspective of a founder, engineer, and customer, and I am excited to contribute as they build agent-based infrastructure for the frontend, backend, and agents.”
Hashimoto is one of the most prominent figures in the open-source software community. He has consistently ranked among the most active global contributors on GitHub for over a decade. His work has shaped the way developers build, deploy, and operate software at every level of the technology stack. He is also a staunch supporter of open-source software sustainability, making significant philanthropic contributions to various projects, including the Zig programming language.
“Mitchell understands something that is easy to say but hard to do: winning the hearts of developers means building their trust over years through great software,” said Tom Occhino, Chief Product Officer at Vercel. “He developed tools that helped define modern infrastructure by making them truly excellent, not by locking users into them. That philosophy aligns perfectly with how we view Vercel’s role in this ecosystem.”
Hashimoto joins a roster of prominent board members and advisors, including Steffan Tomlinson, CFO of Stripe, and Susan St. Ledger, former Global Field Operations President at HashiCorp. They all work to realise Vercel’s mission to enable the world to build applications with the speed, security, and scalability needed to succeed with AI.