While many pre-AI startups are scrambling to find their footing in the new era of artificial intelligence, Vercel is having a very different experience. While many startups founded prior to the emergence of ChatGPT are struggling to position themselves for the AI era, Vercel a 10-year-old dev tool and website hosting platform is benefiting from the explosion of AI-generated apps and agents.
The company isn't just surviving the AI transition. It's being supercharged by it.
The Numbers Are Hard to Ignore
The revenue growth Vercel has posted over the past two years is extraordinary. The company's annual recurring revenue has skyrocketed from $100 million at the beginning of 2024 to a run rate of $340 million by the end of February 2026. That's more than a 3x increase in roughly two years the kind of trajectory that gets Wall Street's attention.
The driver behind this surge is a fundamental shift in who is building software. Speaking at the HumanX conference in San Francisco, CEO Guillermo Rauch told the audience: "When I started this company, only tens of millions of people could deploy. Now we're seeing that everybody in the world can create an app."
That democratization of app development powered by AI tools that allow non-developers to build and ship software has put Vercel at the center of a massive new wave of deployments.
Agents Are the Real Growth Engine
Beyond non-developer creators, Vercel is seeing something even more significant: AI agents are becoming prolific builders in their own right. Rauch said that 30% of the apps running on the company's platform already came from agents.
That figure is striking. Nearly a third of Vercel's hosted applications were not built by humans at all they were created autonomously by AI systems. And Rauch believes this is just the beginning. Vercel is betting that as more apps are created by AI agents instead of humans, the company will become the primary platform for hosting everything agents develop. "Agents are very prolific at deploying," Rauch said.
The logic is compelling. If AI agents are going to generate software at a scale that dwarfs human output, then the infrastructure to host that software becomes one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in tech.
"No Ceiling" on the Total Addressable Market
When asked what Wall Street should understand about Vercel, Rauch didn't hold back. "The total addressable market of infrastructure has now grown, and it simply has no ceiling," he said.
According to Rauch, agents will accelerate software production by making it easier to generate custom solutions than to purchase existing software. "All of that software… it needs to go somewhere, and we think it's going to be Vercel," he said.
It's a bold claim but one that the company's recent growth trajectory makes harder to dismiss.
IPO Is Coming — Just No Set Date
Rauch's comments at HumanX were notably candid about the company's public market ambitions. When asked about IPO plans, he suggested the company is already operating with the discipline of a public entity. "Vercel is very much a working public company," Rauch said. As for timing, he added: "There's no perfect timeline or quarter I can give. The company's ready and getting more ready for it every day."
That's about as close to an IPO signal as a CEO can give without actually filing an S-1.
A Frozen IPO Window — For Now
Despite Vercel's readiness, the broader IPO market is not cooperating. 2026 was expected to be a strong year for new listings, but a sharp sell-off in software fueled by fears of AI disruption has effectively frozen the IPO pipeline. Aside from SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI, most talk of public debuts has largely ceased. Once any of those companies go public, all expected to be blockbuster hits, the window may open again.
Vercel is well-positioned to move quickly when that window does open.
What Vercel Is and Who It Competes With
For those unfamiliar, Vercel was last valued at $9.3 billion when it raised a $300 million Series F led by Accel in September. The company competes with Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services for hosting services, and also offers v0, a vibe coding tool for creating websites and apps.
The combination of infrastructure hosting, developer tooling, and now AI agent deployment puts Vercel in a uniquely strong position as the software industry undergoes its most significant transformation in decades.
