Daniel Stenberg is the founder and lead developer of cURL and libcurl, a Swedish software developer who works full-time on open source from his home in Stockholm. He serves as President of The European Open Source Academy and is an active member of the IETF working on HTTP/2 and QUIC protocols.

Stenberg started his career at IBM in 1991 working with Unix and C programming, then worked as an embedded systems consultant before joining Mozilla from 2013 to 2018. He created cURL in 1996 to power an IRC bot that provided currency exchange rates, initially naming it httpget before evolving into cURL in 1998.

Stenberg has received the 2017 Polhem Prize, the 2025 IVA Gold Medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and the 2025 European Open Source Achievement Award. He has authored multiple books including Everything cURL, Uncurled, HTTP/3 Explained, and HTTP/2 Explained, and has received the Google Open Source Peer Bonus five times.

Since February 2019, Stenberg works at wolfSSL offering commercial support for cURL while maintaining the project with over 2,300 contributors. cURL is estimated to be installed on over 10 billion devices worldwide, including smartphones, cars, IoT devices, and even spacecraft.

cURL has become a fundamental component of global internet infrastructure, used by billions of devices and major platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Spotify, and Facebook. The project supports 26+ network protocols and has evolved from 2,200 lines of code in 1998 to over 170,000 lines today, powering data transfers across the internet for nearly three decades.