The Zulip Foundation

Zulip is a critical piece of software for my business: It's the main tool my company has used to communicate for more than 13 years, and it's the primary forum used by our 3,000+ person alumni community. Our Zulip realm has over 4M messages.

I share this because I hope it makes it clear that I have a vested interest in Zulip's future. And I'm happy about this news; I'm confident Zulip will continue to improve for many years.

Also, for those who don't know: Zulip was initially a for-profit startup, which was acquired by Dropbox in 2014. Tim then went to great lengths to get Dropbox to later open source it, and allow him to found a new company (the one that was today donated to the new nonprofit foundation) to continue work on Zulip. I can't think of any other cases where a founder has gone to such great lengths to do right by their users.

We'll have an LLM process the complains as proof of complaint and use that as the basis for our new cryptocurrency called CurmudgeonCoin and have an ICO. We'll make atto dollars!

I just gave Zulip a try with a team of 3. I loved the UI because I spent years in pain finding things in big Slack and Mattermost installations (big = 30 users, nowhere near enterprise-level). For my two junior colleagues, instead, Zulip was too complicated. We evventually switched over to Discord.

I highly recommend Zulip to anybody who faces the problem that the concept of threads and channels is not a good fit to their mental model of tasks and groups in teams.

> It’s hard these days to feel confident that a company whose product you love won’t yield to commercial pressure and start selling your data, putting in ads, or otherwise violating your trust. It’s been a challenge to convincingly make the case that this won’t happen to Zulip, especially to folks who might not have time to investigate deeply. The Zulip Foundation, which has the goal of serving the public good, makes this so much easier to communicate clearly.

As a huge fan of Zulip the app and the team behind it, I have intensely mixed feelings about the AI-ness of it all. But this does seem to be the most responsible way forward.

Zulip needed to be able to outlast its founders to be a truly sustainable project. The way they've focused on building up their contribution pipeline, the effort they spend on mentoring new developers, it has all built towards that being possible.

https://blog.zulip.com/2021/12/17/why-zulip-will-stand-the-t...

It seems like just yesterday that the core team started experimenting with using Claude to work on Zulip, which maybe adds to the surprise of this announcement. But I don't begrudge those individuals their choices. Ten+ years is a long time to work on any project.

https://blog.zulip.com/2025/11/24/zulip-ten-years/

Here's to the Zulip project continuing to maintain its engineering excellence and its community principles for the next ten years.

Reads like Anthropic has recognized that in order to better get into enterprise it needs to be better than Slack - meet users where they are most of the time. Having someone experienced with a good reputation and a say on how to steer a product sounds quite beneficial.