While many startups founded before the advent of ChatGPT struggle to position themselves for the AI age, Vercel, a 10-year-old programming tool and website hosting platform, is benefiting from the explosion of AI-powered apps and agents.
“When I started this company, only tens of millions of people could grow,” Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told the audience at HumanX conference in San Francisco last week. “Now we see that everyone in the world can build an app.”
The boom in non-developer app creation has been a major boon to Vercel’s business.
The company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) has soared from 100 million dollars in early 2024, according to The Information, with a rate of $340 million by the end of February 2026, according to Forbes.
Given this development, Rauch was asked on stage about his IPO plans. He suggested that the company already operates under the discipline of a public body. “Vercel is very much a public company,” Rauch said.
As for when it will debut, he replied, “There’s no perfect timeline or quarter that I can give. The company is ready and getting more ready for it every day.”
This year was expected to be strong for new listings, but a sharp selloff 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 stalled. Once any of these companies go public, all expected to be blockbusters, the window may reopen.
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Meanwhile, most tech CEOs have kept quiet about their IPO plans. But Rauch telegraphs the company’s public market readiness, suggesting that Vercel is considering an IPO in the not-too-distant future.
When pressed on what Wall Street should know about Vercel, Rauch replied, “The total addressable infrastructure market has now grown and there’s simply no ceiling.”
Vercel is betting that as more apps are built by AI agents instead of humans, the company will become the primary platform for hosting all the agents they develop.
“Agents are very productive in development,” Rauch said, adding that 30% of apps running on the company’s platform already come from agents.
According to Rauch, agents will speed up software production by making it easier to build custom solutions rather than buying existing software.
“All this software … has to go somewhere, and we think it’s going to be Vercel,” he said.
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 building websites and apps.
