The day that Anthropic released its newest AI model last month, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch held an all-hands meeting at his company’s headquarters in San Francisco. He started with a set of slides outlining key moments in the (brief) history of AI coding. It kicked off with Github Copilot in 2021 (“it could barely complete code”), then to ChatGPT a year later (coding ended up being “a killer use case”), on to Anthropic’s Sonnet 3.5 in 2024 (which “could clearly be trusted” with smaller bits of code).

Anthropic’s latest, Opus 4.6, felt like another one of those milestones. “This is going to be a big moment for the world,” he recalls telling his staff. It’s certainly made an impression: Claude Code, long a front runner in the AI coding wars, has begun to break away further. The model is so impressive that shortly after it was released, it triggered the so-called “SaaSpocalypse,” wiping away billions of dollars in value from global software-as-a-service stocks as investors worried those firms could be automated away.

It was a jumpscare for the market, but may be a harbinger of good news for Vercel, which helps developers to build, deploy and host web apps, and now, AI agents. It’s a classic picks and shovels story — selling supplies to the miners feverishly exploiting the gold rush: With the glut of new code generated thanks to AI, someone’s got to host it. “We've seen a tremendous acceleration on deployments,” Rauch says. “Fundamentally, we want to become the infrastructure layer of this new generation of software.”

Vercel isn’t a household name like OpenAI or Google, but it’s a crucial vendor for some of the world’s biggest brands, including Under Armour, Stripe and Sonos, who use Vercel to host their digital infrastructure. (One of the most popular ways to view the Epstein Files, an interface called Jmail that mimics a Gmail inbox, is hosted on Vercel.) In September, the company raised $300 million, co-led by blueblood venture firm Accel and GIC, one of Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds. The fundraising round lifted the startup’s valuation to $9.3 billion, up from $3.25 billion the year before. The influx of cash also makes Rauch, an Argentine immigrant, a billionaire, worth at least $2.1 billion, according to Forbes estimates.

Vercel is certainly benefiting from its ties to Claude Code. It’s not because of any sort of commercial relationship. Instead, it’s Vercel’s popularity in the developer ecosystem that has organically turned it into a go-to web hosting tool for Claude. One of the most popular ways to build websites is through an open source framework called next.js, a tool built and maintained by Vercel. As a result, language models like Claude have become very good at writing next.js code, thanks to the training data fed into the models. So when a user vibe codes an app, Vercel becomes the natural tool for Claude to suggest when it comes time to deploy. “LLMs seem to love Vercel, and we love them back,” says Accel partner Dan Levine, an early Vercel backer.

It’s early, but the boost from Claude Code is taking shape. Vercel clients that use Claude represent a little over 1% of users, but they generate almost 15% of overall Vercel deployments. More broadly, Vercel deployments that come from apps vibe coded by AI agents — everything from to-do list apps to customer service bots — have grown too, from almost 5% in June 2025 to more than 21% in February. Of those deployments made by agents, almost 70% of them come from Claude Code. The boom from AI coding has helped to spike sales for Vercel. Run-rate GAAP revenue hit $340 million at the end of February, up 86% year over year, the company told Forbes.

“The last thing that you want to vibe code and reinvent from scratch is the foundational stuff that's going to run your software.” Guillermo Rauch, CEO, Vercel

“The last thing that you want to vibe code and reinvent from scratch is the foundational stuff that's going to run your software.”

Rauch, the son of an industrial engineer and chemical engineer, grew up in Lanús, a province just south of Buenos Aires. Despite their highly technical jobs, both of his parents were fairly computer illiterate. But his father had the foresight to buy the family a PC when Rauch was 7-years-old. His father — the first in his family to get a university education — realized that all the systems and methods for engineering he learned in college would become obsolete as they went digital. “Don’t bother with what I learned,” Rauch recalls his father telling him.

So Rauch became obsessed with open source software programming. There was only one problem. “I had to teach myself English in order to learn a program, because there were no materials in Spanish,” says Rauch. When he was a teen, he became a core contributor to MooTools, a popular Javascript library that earned him global recognition in the developer community. It even attracted the attention of Facebook, who tried to hire him, but reconsidered when they learned he was a 17-year-old in Argentina. A year later, as he was about to finish high school, he dropped out as he received job offers from around the world. The next year, he moved to San Francisco, where he started his first company Cloudup, for uploading files and media. After selling the startup to Automattic, the company behind Wordpress, Rauch founded a web hosting startup called Zeit. It would eventually morph into Vercel.

Now Vercel’s customers are leaning more on the startup as they build out their AI businesses. Last month, Notion, the $11.3 billion-valued productivity and note-taking app, used Vercel to launch Notion Workers, a platform that lets developers build and deploy AI agents. Vercel was the “best choice,” for the launch, says CEO Ivan Zhao, calling Rauch “one of the legendary programmers.” In a world where more and more software is written to be consumed by AI agents, Vercel has struck a good balance in gearing its tools toward both human developers and AI agents. “Vercel is one of the fastest, if not the fastest,” in adapting to those tradeoffs, Zhao says.

Zhao also uses Vercel for personal projects. During the holiday break, he tapped the service to deploy and host his own video game, a history game that lets players time travel and talk to people from different eras throughout the ages. Zhao’s goal for the project was to get a better feel for vibe coding and developer tools available to engineers as the state of the art becomes more advanced — a lesson he undertook on the beaches of Puerto Vallarta while vacationing with his wife. When Notion reconvened in the new year, he held an all-hands to share his insights with his team.

Vercel isn’t the only infrastructure player gunning to take advantage of the explosion in new AI-generated apps. Big public companies (like Cloudflare, worth $75 billion) to upstarts (like $5.1-valued Supabase) are clamoring for position. Then there are other deploying and hosting services, like Netlify, Render and Fly.io all fighting for a piece of the market.

But as AI coding poses an existential threat to apps everywhere, could it come for Vercel as well? Rauch thinks his company is safe for now, because most people don’t want to vibe code infrastructure or other mission critical parts of a business, like a payments system (so a company like Stripe, for example, is also in the clear for now, Rauch posits). “The last thing that you want to vibe code and reinvent from scratch is the foundational stuff that's going to run your software,” Rauch says.

But sooner or later, the models may get so good that infrastructure companies are in trouble too. As Accel’s Levine puts it, no matter what moat Vercel thinks it has, it is still a software company, and at the end of the day, the company is still vulnerable if it gets “complacent.” “It's easier to build a Vercel competitor than it was before,” he says. Now the company’s job is to make a service so superior that would-be rivals don’t bother: “Why would you want to do that?”

Already more than a decade old, Vercel, like every other company, is trying to tilt its business more toward AI. Instead of just deploying and hosting websites, the company also hosts agents. (Rauch declined to share how much of the business is split between servicing web apps versus AI agents.) Three years ago, the company first released v0, an agent that helps clients create user interfaces from natural language prompts.

Rauch says the ultimate moonshot of the company is to enable people to create the elusive one-person unicorn startup. The vision: fully autonomous AI software infrastructure. For example, if a customer notices something broken with their app, an AI product manager could triage the problem, push out the change and monitor the fix to see how it affects the web traffic. “You're just operating teams of agents that are doing the entire software maintenance,” says Rauch. “This could be the promised land.”

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