While many startups founded prior to the emergence of ChatGPT are struggling to position themselves for the AI era, Vercel, a 10-year-old dev tool and website hosting platform, is benefiting from the explosion of AI-generated apps and agents.
“When I started this company, only tens of millions of people could deploy,” Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told the audience at the HumanX conference in San Francisco last week. “Now we’re seeing that everybody in the world can create an app.”
The explosion in app creation by non-developers has been a significant boon to Vercel’s business.
The company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) has skyrocketed from $100 million at the beginning of 2024, as reported by The Information, to a run rate of $340 million by the end of February 2026, according to Forbes.
Given that growth, Rauch was asked onstage about his IPO plans. He suggested the company is already operating with the discipline of a public entity. “Vercel is very much a work-in-public company,” Rauch said.
As for when the debut will happen, he replied: “There’s no perfect timeline or quarter I can give. The company’s ready and getting more ready for it every day.”
This year was expected to be strong for new listings, but a sharp sell-off in software, fueled by the fear of AI disruption, has effectively frozen the IPO pipeline. Aside from SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, most talk of public debuts has largely ceased. Once any of those company’s go public, all expected to be blockbuster hits, the window may open again.
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Meanwhile, most tech CEOs have gone quiet about their IPO plans. But Rauch is telegraphing the company’s public market readiness, suggesting that Vercel is eyeing a listing in the not-too-distant future.
When pressed about what Wall Street should know about Vercel, Rauch responded: “The total addressable market of infrastructure has now grown, and it simply has no ceiling.”
Vercel is betting that as more apps are created by AI agents instead of humans, the company will become the primary platform for hosting everything agents develop.
“Agents are very prolific at deploying,” Rauch said, adding that 30% of the apps running on the company’s platform already came from agents.
According to Rauch, agents will accelerate software production by making it easier to generate custom solutions than to purchase existing software.
“All of that software … it needs 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 it also offers v0, a vibe-coding tool for creating websites and apps.
