What is Vercel
Vercel is a technology company providing development, deployment, and hosting infrastructure for web applications. Guillermo Rauch founded it in 2015 under the name ZEIT; it was rebranded to Vercel in April 2020 and is headquartered in San Francisco. The company’s About page positions it as an infrastructure company — “the platform where humans and agents build software together” — with infrastructure meant to serve both the people writing code and the coding agents acting on their behalf.
Business and main products
- The Vercel platform: build, deployment, and hosting for websites and applications. According to third-party statistics cited by Wikipedia, it hosts about 1.9% of all websites, on infrastructure that runs on AWS (see the AWS entry).
- Next.js: the open-source web framework created and maintained by Vercel, originally developed by Rauch.
- v0: released in 2023, an AI tool that generates web applications from natural-language prompts.
- AI SDK: a TypeScript/JavaScript library released in 2023 for building streaming conversational interfaces.
- Turborepo: a build system acquired in December 2021.
For current plans, features, and regions, read the Vercel website as it stands today.
Discussion in the show
In Weekly #001’s chapter “设计工程师、全栈闭环与‘每个人都是 OPC’” (Design engineers, full-stack loops, and “everyone is OPC”), while discussing the talent mix of AI-native companies, Guizang says in the Chinese transcript: “Look at who they hire — people from Linear, people from Vercel, all CTO-level, full-stack, lots of startup backgrounds… The Vercel people — even their designers wrote their own renderers.”. “They” refers to the AI-native companies under discussion; Vercel is cited as a reference for full-stack and design-engineer culture. See the episode 001 chapter; English transcript chapters are not available.
Frequently asked questions
What kind of company is Vercel?
Vercel is an infrastructure company providing web application deployment, hosting, and developer tools. It was founded by Guillermo Rauch in 2015 as ZEIT and renamed Vercel in 2020. See the official About page and Wikipedia.
What is the relationship between Vercel and Next.js?
Next.js is the open-source web framework created and maintained by Vercel. The framework itself is open source, and Vercel’s commercial platform provides hosting and deployment for it. Documentation is at nextjs.org.
What is v0?
v0 is an AI tool Vercel released in 2023 that generates web applications from natural-language prompts. It lives at v0.app.
What is Vercel’s official website?
The company site is vercel.com, with the corporate overview at vercel.com/about.