Vercel grabs $300M in late-stage funding to fuel its AI pivot – News

Vercel Inc., the front-end development specialist that enables companies to build and deploy scalable websites quickly, said today it has raised $300 million in a late-stage round to accelerate its transition to focus on artificial intelligence.

The company said its oversubscribed Series F funding round was led by Accel and the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC, with participation from new investors BlackRock, StepStone and Khosla Ventures, raising its valuation to $9.3 billion.

As more enterprises come to rely on AI for critical workflows, demand for developer-friendly platforms like Vercel is increasing rapidly, founder and Chief Executive Guillermo Rauch said in a blog post announcing the investment.

Silicon Valley-based Vercel made its name helping developers build websites and applications. It’s the creator of Next.js, a popular open-source framework that’s used to build front ends for websites and applications. The company commercializes Node.js through a cloud service that offloads processing tasks usually done in the user’s browser to website operators’ servers. That allows those tasks to be completed faster, which reduces web page loading times.

Having established itself as a developer favorite, Vercel has in the last year shifted its focus towards AI development with the launch of its AI Cloud platform. Its main component is a software development kit known as the AI SDK, which provides streamlined access to more than 60 of the most powerful large language models from companies including OpenAI, Anthropic PBC, Meta Platforms Inc., Cohere Inc. and others.

The AI SDK has proven to be immensely popular, with more than 3 million downloads per week, making it the company’s fastest-growing open-source project, Rauch said. “Just like React brought accessibility to pages, the AI SDK is bringing accessibility to tokens to multiple sources of intelligence,” he added.

The company also offers access to AI infrastructure and an open-source vibe coding platform called v0, which boasts more than 3.5 million users. Earlier this month, it debuted its very first AI agent, called Vercel Agent, in public beta. It’s primary task is to automate code reviews, scanning human- and AI-generated codebases, identifying problems and creating fixes for any problems it finds. Its fixes are validated in sandboxed environments to ensure they don’t cause any further strife.

“Our bet on open source has become a powerful flywheel, and we’re excited to continue democratizing agents and making them accessible to everyone,” Rauch said. “We’ve evolved as much in this last year as we did in the first nine. Because there has to be a cloud that’s designed and purpose-built for AI applications. Vercel has built this from the ground up with the AI Cloud.”

The AI Cloud has helped to ignite dramatic new growth for Vercel, doubling its user base over the last 12 months and increasing its revenue by 82%, off an undisclosed base. Rauch said its customers include some of the leading players in the AI industry, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as big-name enterprises like PayPal Holdings Inc., Nike Inc. and Walmart Inc.

Rauch said Vercel will use the funds from today’s round to expand its AI cloud services and enhance the v0 development agent’s capabilities. It’s also set to launch a mobile version of v0 later this month, which will make it possible for developers to build applications using voice and camera inputs.

Separately, Vercel is also planning a $300 million secondary tender offer for current and former employees and early investors, which is expected to close next month.

Image: Vercel