Vercel Inc.

Guillermo Rauch grew up in Lanús, Buenos Aires, Argentina, spending his early teenage years teaching himself Linux and advocating for open source software. He got his first full-time job as a frontend engineer at 18 and moved to San Francisco, where he founded his first company Cloudup — later acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Rauch had also created Socket.IO, a real-time communication library that became foundational web infrastructure. In 2015, he founded ZEIT in San Francisco, building tools to make the web faster with a focus on developer experience. In 2016, the company released Next.js — a React framework that would become the dominant way to build modern web applications.

ZEIT rebranded to Vercel in April 2020, signalling a shift from tooling to infrastructure. Next.js had exploded in adoption: from 35,000 websites in April 2020 to 4 million by May 2023, including Walmart, Apple, Nike, Netflix, TikTok, Uber, Lyft, and Starbucks. Vercel's model was to make deployment frictionless — a git push away from a globally distributed application. By 2023, Vercel had reached $50 million in ARR. The company had raised over $500 million from investors including Accel, Google Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures.

When ChatGPT launched, Rauch noticed something the rest of the industry initially missed: AI was extraordinarily good at writing React and Tailwind code. Rather than fearing this, he built v0 — an AI tool that transformed text prompts or images into functional web user interfaces. "Instead of the typical reaction — ignore it or fear it — we deeply embraced it," Rauch said. v0 launched in 2023 and immediately became one of the most used AI coding tools in the world. Within a year, v0 revenue had grown from $100 million to over $180 million as more than 3 million builders generated over 100 million applications on the platform.

Vercel raised $300 million in a Series F in September 2025, co-led by Accel and GIC, valuing the company at $9.3 billion. ARR had grown from $100 million at the start of 2024 to $340 million by February 2026 — an 82% year-on-year increase. By early 2026, 30% of all applications running on Vercel's platform had been generated by AI agents rather than human developers. "When I started this company, only tens of millions of people could deploy," Rauch told the HumanX conference in San Francisco. "Now we're seeing that everybody in the world can create an app."

By mid-2026, Vercel had become essential infrastructure for the AI age: not just for human developers deploying applications, but for AI agents that were themselves deploying applications. The company had over 4 million v0 users and an enterprise customer base including OpenAI, Under Armour, and Perplexity. Rauch signalled IPO readiness publicly, calling Vercel "a work-in-public company" already operating with public-company discipline. The total addressable market for infrastructure, he argued, had "no ceiling" — as AI agents became prolific at building and deploying software, the company that hosted everything they built stood to compound indefinitely.