Vercel
American cloud application company
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Vercel Inc. is an American cloud application company. The company created and maintains the Next.js web development framework.[2]
 | |
| Formerly | ZEIT (2015–2020) |
|---|---|
| Type | Private |
| Industry | |
| Founded | 2015 |
| Founder | Guillermo Rauch |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California , U.S. |
Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | Guillermo Rauch (CEO) |
Number of employees | 550 (2025)[1] |
| Website | vercel.com |
Vercel provides developer tools, frameworks, and cloud infrastructure to build and maintain websites.[3] It is the maker of v0, an AI tool for developing websites,[4] and AI SDK. [5] 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.[6] The company maintains a free and open-source library for building AI-generated products.[7] According to W3Techs, Vercel is used as hosting provider by 1.9% of all websites.[8]
History
Vercel was founded by Guillermo Rauch in 2015 as ZEIT.[9][10] Rauch had previously created the realtime event-driven communication library Socket.IO[11] and Next.js, the open source framework that Vercel optimized for their platform.[2] ZEIT was rebranded to Vercel in April 2020, although it retained the company's triangular logo.[9][12]
In June 2021, Vercel raised $102 million in a Series C funding round.[13] In 2023, Vercel released an AI web development tool called v0 that creates web applications with natural language prompts;[4] it won a 2025 Webby Award for developer tools.[14] In 2023, Vercel released a software development kit called AI SDK[15] designed to allow developers to build conversational streaming interfaces in JavaScript and TypeScript.[16] In May 2024, Vercel raised $250 million in a funding round which valued the company at $3.25 billion.[4] Later, in September 2025, the company raised a $300 million Series F, receiving a valuation of $9.3 billion.[17]
In March 2026, Vercel appointed Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp and creator of Terraform, Vagrant, and Ghostty, a performant terminal emulator, to its board of directors.[18]
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,[19][20] which, according to cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock, originated from Lumma Stealer malware infecting an employee's computer after they tried downloading Roblox cheat scripts.[21] 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.[22][23]
Acquisitions
Vercel has acquired a number of other companies:
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.[b 1] Deployments are, by default, automatically given a subdomain under the vercel.app domain,[30] although Vercel offers support for custom domains for deployments.[b 1]
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.[31]
Controversy and boycott
In September 2025, Vercel's CEO, Guillermo Rauch, posted a selfie on X that he took with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, at a private tech meeting in New York, where they discussed artificial intelligence and its application in Israel's economy and defense.[32][33] With the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the widespread backlash against Vercel led to the boycott of Vercel.[34][35]
Many developers and users deleted their Vercel accounts and switched to alternatives.[34][33] Tech for Palestine endorses the Vercel boycott and supports the migration to Netlify.[36] Amjad Masad offered companies help and discounts when switching to Replit.[37]