VERCEL

Guillermo Rauch — an Argentine developer who moved to San Francisco as a teenager — created Socket.io (real-time web framework) and then founded Zeit (later renamed Vercel) in 2015. The original product was Now, a serverless deployment tool.

Rauch also created Next.js in 2016 as an open-source React framework. Next.js exploded in popularity and became the dominant way to build React applications.

Vercel renamed from Zeit in 2020, raised massive funding, and positioned itself as the deployment platform for the modern web. Next.js now has over 120,000 GitHub stars and is used by a significant portion of the top 10,000 websites.

Vercel is a cloud platform for frontend developers. It deploys websites and web applications with zero configuration — push code to Git, Vercel builds and deploys it globally in seconds.

The company created and maintains Next.js, the most popular React framework in the world. Revenue comes from platform subscriptions (free tier, Pro at $20/user/month, Enterprise for large teams).

Vercel's edge network serves billions of requests per day for companies like Washington Post, Under Armour, and Notion.

Vercel Platform (deployment and hosting), Next.js (React framework, open-source), Vercel AI SDK (tools for building AI applications), v0 (AI-powered UI generation), Vercel Edge Functions (serverless at the edge), Vercel Analytics, Vercel Postgres/KV/Blob (data storage)

Own the framework, own the deployment. By creating and maintaining Next.js, Vercel ensures that the most popular React framework is optimized for Vercel's platform.

Developers learn Next.js, deploy on Vercel for free, and upgrade to paid plans as they scale. Vercel also invested heavily in edge computing (v0, Vercel AI SDK) to position itself at the center of the AI application deployment stack.

The open-source business model tension. Next.js is free and open-source.

Vercel makes money by being the best place to deploy Next.js — but developers can deploy Next.js anywhere (AWS, Cloudflare, Netlify). Critics argue Vercel sometimes adds features to Next.js that work best on Vercel's platform, creating a soft lock-in.

Balancing open-source community trust with commercial incentives is an ongoing challenge.

Accel, GV (Google Ventures), Bedrock Capital, SV Angel, CRV, Greenoaks Capital, Tiger Global, Notable Capital