Ben Uretsky Net Worth 2026 - DigitalOcean Co-Founder

No major outlet has published a current net worth estimate for Ben Uretsky. The clearest public number is from Business Insider: on the day DigitalOcean went public in March 2021, it counted 6.51 million shares held by Uretsky and valued them at about $284.3 million at the $43.64 opening price. That stake in the cloud company he co-founded and led as CEO until 2018 is the main source of his wealth.

What is Ben Uretsky's net worth?

There is no Forbes, Bloomberg or Celebrity Net Worth figure for Uretsky. Earlier versions of this page gave $147 million with no source, and we have removed it. The one documented data point is Business Insider's IPO-day tally of 6.51 million DigitalOcean shares worth roughly $284.3 million on March 24, 2021.

That number is a snapshot of one holding, not a net worth. DigitalOcean's share price has moved a long way since its debut, and nobody outside his circle knows how many shares Uretsky has sold, gifted or still holds, what taxes he has paid, or what his other investments are worth. His later ventures, such as Welcome Homes, are private. So the honest answer is that his fortune was worth hundreds of millions of dollars on paper at the IPO, and no reliable estimate exists for 2026.

Where the money comes from

DigitalOcean equity

Uretsky co-founded DigitalOcean in 2011 with his brother Moisey Uretsky and Mitch Wainer, according to Wikipedia. Business Insider reported that Moisey's stake was worth about $352.3 million and Ben's about $284.3 million when the stock began trading. Big venture backers held more: Access Industries' stake was put at $1.03 billion and Andreessen Horowitz's at $683.5 million.

Salary as CEO

DigitalOcean was private while he ran it, so his pay as CEO was never disclosed. Figures like "$6 million a year" or "$17,000 a day" that appeared on this page before had no source and have been removed.

Welcome Homes

In May 2020 Uretsky, Wainer and fellow DigitalOcean co-founder Alec Hartman started Welcome Homes, a New York company that sells new houses online, TechCrunch reported. Business Insider listed Uretsky as the startup's COO in 2021. Welcome raised a Series A of more than $29 million, led by Era Ventures, which closed in September 2022, bringing its total venture funding to nearly $35 million. His ownership share has not been published.

Early life and education

Uretsky's family moved from Russia to the United States when he was five. He grew up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and went to Stuyvesant High School, according to Wikipedia. In a 2019 Forbes contributor interview, the brothers said they did not have a computer at home as children; Ben got into computing by copying games at friends' houses and fixing their problems.

His birth date is not public; Wikipedia lists him among people born in the 1980s. We could not confirm the college degree given on older versions of this page, so we have left it out.

Career timeline

Building DigitalOcean

ServerStack grew out of the failure of another hosting provider, and the Uretskys told Forbes it was profitable almost from its first month. DigitalOcean aimed at individual developers and small teams who wanted simple, cheap cloud servers rather than the enterprise tools sold by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

The brothers said the product found its market in January 2013, when daily sign-ups jumped from about five to around 200. Growth followed quickly. In an October 2017 interview with Business Insider, Uretsky said revenue rose from $77 million in 2015 to $118 million in 2016, that the company had been profitable on an EBITDA basis since 2015, and that it had used its Series B money to secure a $130 million credit line for data center expansion.

Stepping down as CEO

In June 2018 former Citrix chief Mark Templeton replaced Uretsky as CEO. CNBC reported that DigitalOcean then had an annualized revenue run rate above $200 million and had raised more than $123 million. Uretsky told CNBC that the business was looking at a path to becoming a public company and that running one was not among his personal goals. He kept a board seat but left day-to-day management.

Recent news (2025)

In May 2025 The Real Deal, citing the New York Post, reported that customers had filed three lawsuits against Welcome Homes over unfinished or poorly built houses in New York's Hudson Valley. The largest claim sought more than $2.8 million. A company spokesperson called the suits unfounded and said Welcome would address them in court. Company sources told the publication that Welcome had completed 18 homes out of 45 customer contracts. We found no report of how the cases were resolved.

Is Ben Uretsky married?

We found no reliable report naming a spouse. Older versions of this page said he was married to Julia Austin; she was DigitalOcean's chief technology officer while he was CEO, and no source we found describes her as his wife. That claim has been removed.

Net worth compared

Uretsky sits in the same group as other founders whose wealth rests on a single company stake. For other business profiles on this site see Brett Danko and Arman Gabay.

How this page was checked

We rebuilt this page in September 2026. Every figure above comes from the linked reports. We removed an unsourced net worth figure, an invented income table, a made-up height and weight, a wrong spouse, an unverified degree, and a contact section. If a reputable outlet publishes a current estimate, we will add it with its source.