Scott Sellers

President, CEO and Co-Founder Azul

Last Reviewed: September 28, 2026

Executive Summary

Scott Sellers is president, chief executive and co-founder of Azul, the Sunnyvale, California company that builds and supports Java runtimes for enterprises and describes itself as focused exclusively on Java. He co-founded it in 2002 with Gil Tene, now its chief technology officer, and has led it through two changes of majority ownership: a growth equity investment by Vitruvian Partners and Lead Edge Capital in 2020, and a majority investment by Thoma Bravo that closed in December 2025. It is his second company. In 1994 he co-founded 3dfx Interactive, one of the defining graphics processor companies of the early PC gaming era, where he ran research and development and later served as chief technical officer.

Career Highlights

• President, CEO and co-founder of Azul, named on the company’s current leadership page.
• Remained CEO through Thoma Bravo’s majority investment in Azul, announced 18 November 2025 and closed 3 December 2025.
• Led Azul through the 2020 Vitruvian Partners and Lead Edge Capital investment, in which shareholders were to receive about $340 million.
• Co-founded 3dfx Interactive in August 1994 and served as vice president of research and development, senior vice president of product development, chief technical officer and director.
• Earlier a principal engineer at MediaVision Technology, a CPU systems architect at Pellucid and a member of technical staff at Silicon Graphics.
• Holds eight patents in high-performance graphics and computing, according to Azul.

Professional Journey

Sellers began as an engineer in high-performance hardware. According to Azul, he was a member of technical staff at Silicon Graphics, designing high-performance workstations, and a CPU systems architect at Pellucid, which MediaVision acquired. SEC filings record him as a principal engineer at MediaVision Technology, a multimedia computer products company, from June 1993 to June 1994.

In August 1994 he co-founded 3dfx Interactive, which built graphics processors for personal computers and game consoles. He served as vice president of research and development from January 1995 to August 1998, as senior vice president of product development until May 1999, and then as chief technical officer, and he sat on the board from March 1995. By 2001 his title was executive vice president and chief technical officer. Azul credits him with delivering seven award-winning products and developing 14 graphics processors there. 3dfx went public in June 1997, and in April 2001 it sold substantially all of its assets to a subsidiary of NVIDIA.

He co-founded Azul in 2002. Its early products were Java compute appliances built around its own Vega processors; the company later moved to software, and today sells commercially supported OpenJDK builds and a high-performance Java platform. Azul says its customers include 37% of the Fortune 100 and ten of the world’s largest banks. Sellers has kept the company’s focus narrow, saying that since inception Azul “has remained exclusively focused on building the world’s best products to serve the Java community.”

Ownership has changed twice under his leadership. In 2020 Vitruvian Partners and Lead Edge Capital made a strategic growth equity investment, with Azul continuing to operate independently under its existing executive team led by Sellers and Tene. In November 2025 Azul announced that Thoma Bravo would acquire a majority stake, with Vitruvian and Lead Edge reinvesting and keeping minority positions alongside employees; the deal closed on 3 December 2025 with Sellers continuing as CEO. On closing he described Azul as “a differentiated business at the center of Java performance, efficiency and modernization.”

Education

Princeton University

Bachelor of Science, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa