Vlad Shmunis
Founder & Chief Strategy Officer at RingCentral
Shmunis built RingCentral into the leading cloud UCaaS platform, whose telephony APIs underpin call tracking and attribution tools that help marketers measure the ROI of digital advertising through offline phone call conversions.
Last updated May 30, 2026 by the ATDb Editorial Team
Vlad Shmunis is best known as the founder and long-tenured CEO of RingCentral, the cloud communications platform he built from a 1999 startup into a multi-billion-dollar publicly traded company (NYSE: RNG). His early bet on cloud-based telephony over legacy PBX systems proved prescient, and RingCentral's developer APIs have since become foundational infrastructure for call tracking and attribution solutions used widely across the AdTech and performance marketing ecosystem. By enabling marketers to tie inbound phone calls back to specific digital campaigns, keywords, and channels, Shmunis's platform helped close a critical measurement gap between online advertising investment and offline customer conversions. Under Shmunis's leadership as CEO through 2022, RingCentral forged major partnerships with companies including Avaya, Atos, and Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, dramatically expanding its enterprise reach and embedding its communications infrastructure into the workflows of thousands of businesses globally. The company's UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) model became a template for the industry, and its open API ecosystem attracted a broad developer community building call analytics, CRM integrations, and marketing attribution tools on top of its platform. Shmunis transitioned to the role of Chief Strategy Officer in 2022, focusing on long-term strategic direction and key partnerships. His career reflects a consistent thesis that communications infrastructure is a strategic layer for business intelligence — a perspective that has made RingCentral's technology increasingly relevant to advertisers and agencies seeking full-funnel measurement, particularly in high-intent verticals like automotive, healthcare, legal, and financial services where phone calls remain a dominant conversion event.
Chief Executive Officer
RingCentral (1999-2022)
Founder & CEO
Ring Zero (predecessor to RingCentral) (1999-2003)
- M.S. Computer Science, San Francisco State University
- B.S. Mathematics, Kharkiv National University
- Founded RingCentral in 1999 and grew it to a publicly traded company on NYSE (RNG) with peak market capitalization exceeding $30 billion
- Pioneered the shift from on-premise PBX to cloud-based unified communications, establishing UCaaS as a mainstream enterprise category
- Secured landmark partnership with Avaya to deliver cloud communications to Avaya's large enterprise customer base
- Built an open API platform enabling a broad ecosystem of call tracking, CRM, and marketing attribution integrations