Vercel: The $9B startup building frontend cloud for everyone

(5 minutes)

Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup. 

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead.

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email:

• ⚡ This startup helps you deploy web apps extremely fast - a single click

• 💸 They just hit $200M ARR in August 2025, up 80% YoY with customers including Walmart, Nike, OpenAI & Uber

• 💰 They’re currently in talks to raise at a ~$9 billion valuation, up 3x just 15 months from their Series E

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of Vercel 📈

Vercel is the Frontend Cloud that lets anyone build, deploy, and scale web apps and AI-powered experiences - fast.

The mission: make modern web development accessible beyond traditional developers and usher in a “generative web” where apps are spun up on demand for each user (goodbye, downloads 👋).

How it works (in plain English):

• Framework-defined infrastructure ⚙️ - your code describes the infra; Vercel conjures it, so the cloud becomes “invisible.”
  

• Infrastructure on Autopilot 🛫 - They have a global edge and smart defaults so shipping takes seconds, not weeks.
  

• Fluid Compute 🧠 - Their tool is optimized for LLM streaming and long-running AI tasks; you pay only for active CPU.
  

• DX Obsessed 💙 - docs, templates, best practices, and tools that turn junior teams into force multipliers. Think: “a tireless junior dev on standby 24/7.”

The unique unlock: Vercel commercializes and stewards Next.js, so product and platform evolve in tandem - frameworks that beget scalability.

AI leaders only: Get $100 to explore high-performance AI training data.

Train smarter AI with Shutterstock’s rights-cleared, enterprise-grade data across images, video, 3D, audio, and more—enriched by 20+ years of metadata. 600M+ assets and scalable licensing, We help AI teams improve performance and simplify data procurement. If you’re an AI decision maker, book a 30-minute call—qualified leads may receive a $100 Amazon gift card.

Book a call

_{For complete terms and conditions, see the offer page.}

Backstory 👀

Guillermo Rauch grew up in Lanús, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 🇦🇷

Two engineer parents, little money, but infinite curiosity. The house rule? Hack things. 

No screen-time limits - just Linux installs, homegrown games, and boundless tinkering. 🧠

He wrote his first websites at 7 (hello, Dragon Ball Z fandom). Switching to Linux at 11/12 made him a fixture on Datafall.com, where he became the top guru answering deep compile questions. 

At 13, he was freelancing globally, building an interactive calorie counter for a Dutch makeup company and learning the most honest product metric: clients who pay. 💸

School couldn’t keep up. He dropped out in his fifth year of high school to support his family, then bulldozed his way into the U.S. on an O-1 (“extraordinary ability”) visa.

It was tough but he got the O-1 through open-source talks, a best-selling Node/JS book, and real impact. 📚

Impact like: