Zulip Foundation & Team Updates

In May 2026, the Zulip open-source project and Kandra Labs announced the creation of the Zulip Foundation and that four core team members, including Zulip’s founder Tim Abbott, would step back from daily work at Kandra Labs. The Zulip Foundation had an impressive list of Board Members and Advisors lined up, and Kandra Labs had an Interim President (me, Kim Vandiver) in place to ensure continuity of leadership.

So, how have things gone in the past 6 months? Really quite well.

Stability, Hiring, and Consistent Cadences at Kandra

Kandra Labs continues to work to make Zulip the best communication tool for distributed teams.

Core operations have continued as usual; we’ve been putting out regular maintenance releases, security releases, cloud deploys, and documentation updates over the past 6 months. And, we are currently in the midst of preparing for the next major release of Zulip, 13.0. I’m particularly excited about a view links option to see which topics connect to each other, and new date: and topic: search operators.

In the short term after our May announcement, the Kandra Labs team undertook a thorough, if quick, transfer of context. Team members stepped up to take on additional responsibilities, and they adjusted processes of working and lines of internal communication. I’m proud of the way that the team adapted to such a large change, and that throughout this critical time of transition they were supportive of each other and unified in the goal of maintaining and strengthening the Zulip project.

Since then, I’m excited to share that we have brought on several new team members to further support the project. We hired a new Backend & Infrastructure Engineer, a Designer, four Engineers (converting from intern status), and an Operations Coordinator. We are also working with other promising leaders and expect to have more to share on this front soon.

This summer, Kandra Labs participated in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for the 11th consecutive year, mentoring 11 interns; two who did excellent work have now joined us for additional internships post-GSoC. Look for more details in a forthcoming blog post recapping GSoC 2026.

Foundation Updates

After interest and introductions from many people (thank you!), we’ve now filled out the Zulip Foundation Board of Directors and Advisory Board with new members who will be able to advise Kandra Labs across a range of issues.

The Board of Directors has added a fifth member:

• Hazel Weakly joins Tim Abbott, Alya Abbott, Greg Price, and Josh Triplett. Hazel is a former Director of the Haskell Foundation Board, an open source and community advocate, and a Fellow of the Nivenly Foundation.

The Advisory Board has welcomed three additional members:

• Alex Vandiver, former head of Zulip’s infrastructure team, continues to offer his technical perspective and historical context to the Kandra Labs team, and the Zulip Foundation.
• Nicole Foster, Director of Operations for nonprofit NumFOCUS, brings operations and finance backgrounds, familiarity with open source scientific communities, and experience with scaling and fundraising.
• Theo Wait, Director of Operations at open-source chess project Lichess, brings experience with operations and scaling, legal expertise, and context around Zulip’s European users and customers.

The full set of members have bios posted on Zulip’s team page, and some members have introduced themselves in the Zulip development community.

The Board of Directors and Advisory Board have established meeting cadences, and I’ve been giving regular updates about the Kandra Team’s progress and priorities at Board meetings. The Board of Directors is in the process of applying for US federal 501(c)(3) recognition and tax-exempt status. They’ve also provided great insight and assistance to the Kandra Labs team already, including with hiring and sales strategy.

The Foundation adds stability and support to the Zulip open-source project. You can also support the Zulip project in several ways. The community has been a huge part of Zulip’s success, and we appreciate the many ways that our community members support and contribute to Zulip.

Adaptation to AI

In addition to staffing and structural changes at Kandra Labs, we’ve also been navigating the continued advance of AI. The Zulip project continues to believe in the importance of clear, concise, thoughtful discussion of issues in the Zulip development community; in fact the importance of participating in discussions here has only grown, in an environment in which code is quick to produce. We continue to require code that is presented according to Zulip’s guidelines and style to facilitate efficient reviews by members of the core team.

Because of this, you may have already noticed some changes in how the Kandra Labs team guides contributions to the Zulip project:

• We’ve expanded and increased the visibility of our AI Use Policy and Guidelines to clarify our expectations of contributors. Please read the updated guidelines before your next contribution to Zulip.
• We’ve added instructions in AGENTS.md to provide clearer guidance to coding agents when interacting with the Zulip project.
• We’ve refined our guidance on finding an issue to work on. A key principle of the new guidance is to engage contributors in the Zulip development community, rather than through GitHub.

We believe in the importance of creating a welcoming space for community contributors to develop their skills; educating the next generation of open-source software developers is a part of Zulip’s mission. At the same time, we need to ensure that this does not overly burden maintainers. Members of the core team will keep a close eye on the contributor and maintainer experience, and will continue to adjust processes and policies.

Near-term Plans

The core team is focused on the upcoming 13.0 server release, and we’ll be sharing additional details about that with you soon. We’ve begun to plan the 14.0 release, and will also continue our usual cadence of maintenance releases, security releases, cloud deploys, and documentation updates.

If you have any questions or feedback as a Zulip customer, please contact support@zulip.com. As always, all are welcome to drop by the Zulip development community.