In 2012, our founders realized something crucial: developers were struggling with overly complex cloud infrastructure that made building and scaling applications unnecessarily difficult. Existing cloud providers were built for enterprises, leaving independent developers and small-to-medium-sized businesses with expensive, complicated solutions that distracted from what mattered most - creating great software. So they built DigitalOcean with a singular focus on simplicity, launching their first product, the Droplet, an easy-to-use virtual machine that could be spun up in just minutes.
What started as a developer-friendly cloud platform has evolved into the comprehensive agentic cloud, now serving more than 640,000 customers worldwide from students learning to code to rapidly scaling businesses. Over the past decade, DigitalOcean has expanded beyond virtual machines to offer managed databases, Kubernetes, App Platform for modern application deployment, and most recently Gradient™ AI Inference Cloud for building and scaling AI-powered applications. The company remains headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado, employing over 1,000 people who share a common mission: to simplify cloud computing and AI so builders can spend more time creating software that changes the world.