Vercel
Vercel provides the infrastructure and tools that enable developers to build, scale, and secure a faster, more personalized web with AI-native capabilities.
Founding Story
Founded in 2015 as ZEIT by Guillermo Rauch, Tony Kovanen, and Naoyuki Kanezawa. The founding team had previously worked together on Socket.IO and at Automattic. The company was created to make cloud deployment simple, global, and real-time, focusing on providing developers with a seamless deployment experience. The initial vision centered on creating infrastructure that would enable developers to deploy and scale web applications effortlessly. In April 2020, the company rebranded from ZEIT to Vercel.
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Leadership
Founders
Guillermo Rauch
Previously created Socket.IO (realtime event-driven communication library), co-authored Mongoose Node.js in 2012, founded Cloudup in 2013 (acquired by Automattic), worked at Automattic before founding Vercel. Previously served as CTO and Co-Founder of LearnBoost. Grew up near Buenos Aires, Argentina, created open-source 'fancy menu' at age 16, dropped out of high school, moved to work in Switzerland at age 17, emigrated to the US at 18.
Tony Kovanen
Core contributor to Socket.IO, worked at Automattic, served as CTO of Vercel from December 2015 to August 2017, co-authored Next.js. After leaving Vercel, worked at Iglu, Gatsby Inc., Saulx, and Token Terminal; joined Mastra in 2025.
Naoyuki Kanezawa
Core contributor to Socket.IO and Engine.io before co-founding Vercel.
Executive Team
Guillermo Rauch
CEO and Founder
Created Socket.IO, co-authored Mongoose, founded Cloudup (acquired by Automattic), worked at Automattic, previously CTO and Co-Founder of LearnBoost
Jeanne DeWitt Grosser
Chief Operating Officer (COO)
Former Chief Business Officer at Stripe for 9 years, helped take Stripe from $100M to billions in revenue, joined Vercel in March 2025
Business Model
Revenue Model
B2B SaaS with freemium and open-source model. Revenue from API usage, subscriptions (Pro and Enterprise tiers), edge requests, data transfer, compute resources, and usage-based pricing for Fluid Compute (Active CPU pricing). Enterprise customers pay for enhanced features including advanced security, support, SLAs, and custom resource allocations.
Pricing Tiers
For personal, non-commercial use. Includes: repository import with deployment in seconds, automatic CI/CD, Web Application Firewall, global automated CDN, Fluid Compute, DDoS mitigation, traffic/performance insights. Usage: 1M edge requests/month, 100GB fast data transfer, 5,000 image transformations, 1GB blob storage, 10 concurrent sandboxes.
For professional developers and teams. Includes all Hobby features plus: $20 of included usage credit, advanced spend management, team collaboration, unlimited viewer seats, faster builds with no queues, cold start prevention, enterprise add-ons. Usage: 10M edge requests/month, 1TB fast data transfer, up to 40 custom firewall rules, 2,000 concurrent sandboxes.
For teams requiring high performance, security, and support. Includes all Pro features plus: guest and team access controls, SCIM and directory sync, managed WAF rulesets, multi-region compute and failover, 99.99% SLA, advanced support, custom usage limits for edge requests/data transfer/compute, up to 1,000 custom firewall rules, custom security questionnaires.
Target Markets
- Individual developers and hobbyists
- Professional developers
- Startups and fast-growing companies
- Enterprise organizations
- E-commerce companies
- Media and content companies
- Building and deploying AI applications
- Web application development and hosting
- E-commerce sites
- Marketing pages and landing pages
- Multi-tenant platforms
- Real-time conversational interfaces
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
- PayPal
- Nike
History & Milestones
Acquired Tremor open source React library
Jeanne DeWitt Grosser joins as COO; Celebrated 10th anniversary
Crossed $200 million in ARR; v0 won Webby Award for developer tools; Next.js reached over 500 million downloads in 12 months
Appointed Keith Messick as CMO
Acquired NuxtLabs (creators of Nuxt and Nitro frameworks)
5 AI Tools by Vercel
Skills
20dAn open ecosystem for reusable AI agent skills that can be installed with a single command to enhance agents with procedural knowledge.
add-skill
26dA CLI tool that adds AI skills to your Next.js project by generating route handlers and React components.
An open-source developer toolkit (use workflow) that makes JavaScript and TypeScript functions durable, enabling resumable, stateful workflows with built-in retries and observability.
Grep
5moEffortlessly search for code, files, and paths across a million GitHub repositories.
