The Team Behind Deploy: Shipping AI, the DigitalOcean Way

Deploy 2026, hosted by DigitalOcean in San Francisco, brought together developers, startup founders, and industry partners to explore building and scaling AI products with minimal complexity. The event featured discussions on infrastructure, inference costs, and production workloads, alongside the unveiling of DigitalOcean's AI-Native Cloud, a five-layer stack designed for AI-native companies with over 15 new product launches, including Inference Router and Managed Weaviate. Keynote presentations and live demonstrations highlighted DigitalOcean's collaborative culture, where marketing, sales, and engineering teams worked closely with customers to address AI infrastructure challenges in real-time. The event also showcased the company's new branding and website, and for the first time introduced paid sponsorships, further solidifying its partnerships with industry leaders like NVIDIA and AMD. Attendees, including customers like Hippocratic AI and Character AI, shared their experiences of building on DigitalOcean's platform, emphasizing the company's customer-focused approach and commitment to evolving its products based on user feedback.