Vercel
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Vercel Inc. is an American cloud application company. The company created and maintains the Next.js web development framework.
Vercel provides developer tools, frameworks, and cloud infrastructure to build and maintain websites. It is the maker of v0, an AI tool for developing websites, and AI SDK. In September 2025, Vercel raised $300 million in a Series F funding round co-led by Accel and GIC, valuing the company at $9.3 billion. The company maintains a free and open-source library for building AI-generated products.
History
Vercel was founded by Guillermo Rauch in 2015 as ZEIT. Rauch had previously created the realtime event-driven communication library Socket.IO and Next.js, the open source framework that Vercel optimized for their platform. ZEIT was rebranded to Vercel in April 2020, although it retained the company's triangular logo.
In June 2021, Vercel raised $102 million in a Series C funding round. In 2023, Vercel released an AI web development tool called v0 that creates web applications with natural language prompts; it won a 2025 Webby Award for developer tools. In 2023, Vercel released a software development kit called AI SDK designed to allow developers to build conversational streaming interfaces in JavaScript and TypeScript. In May 2024, Vercel raised $250 million in a funding round which valued the company at $3.25 billion. Later, in September 2025, the company raised a $300 million Series F, receiving a valuation of $9.3 billion.
In September 2025, Vercel faced backlash after CEO Guillermo Rauch met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu amid the Gaza war to discuss artificial intelligence and its application in Israel's economy and defense. In response, several users stated intentions to migrate their applications off of Vercel.
In March 2026, Vercel appointed Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp and creator of Terraform, Vagrant, and , a performant terminal emulator, to its board of directors.
2026 breach
On April 19, 2026, Vercel disclosed a security breach in which certain internal systems were accessed by unauthorized actors. According to the company, the breach originated from the third-party AI tool Context.ai being compromised, which, according to cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock, originated from Lumma Stealer malware infecting an employee's computer after they tried downloading Roblox cheat scripts. The attacker breached a Vercel employee's Google Workspace account, accessing "some Vercel environments and environment variables that were not marked as 'sensitive'". A threat actor claiming to be part of ShinyHunters claimed responsibility and offered stolen data for sale at $2 million on BreachForums, though the post was later deleted and the group reportedly denied involvement.
Acquisitions
Vercel has acquired a number of other companies:
- in December 2021, Vercel acquired Turborepo.
- in October 2022, Vercel acquired Splitbee.
- in January 2025, Vercel acquired Tremor.
- in July 2025, Vercel acquired , the creator of the popular web framework Nuxt.
Architecture
Vercel's architecture is built around composable architecture, and deployments are handled through Git repositories, the Vercel CLI, or the Vercel REST API. Vercel is a member of the MACH Alliance.
Deployments through Vercel are handled through Git repositories, with support for GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket repositories. Deployments are, by default, automatically given a subdomain under the vercel.app domain, although Vercel offers support for custom domains for deployments.
Vercel's infrastructure uses Amazon Web Services.
In 2025, Vercel introduced a web application infrastructure model named "Fluid" that enables an instance in a local region to handle multiple requests concurrently, similar to a traditional server, while also maintaining the elasticity of serverless systems.
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Citations
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