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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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I started this company, only tens of millions of people could deploy,\u201d Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told the audience at the HumanX<\/a> conference in San Francisco last week. \u201cNow we\u2019re seeing that everybody in the world can create an app.\u201d<\/p>\n The explosion in app creation<\/a> by non-developers has been a significant boon to Vercel\u2019s business.<\/p>\n The company\u2019s annual recurring revenue (ARR) has skyrocketed from $100 million<\/a> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cVercel is very much a working public company,\u201d Rauch said.<\/p>\n As for when the debut will happen, he replied: \u201cThere\u2019s no perfect timeline or quarter I can give. The company\u2019s ready and getting more ready for it every day.\u201d<\/p>\n 2026 was expected to be a strong year 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\u2019s go public, all expected to be blockbuster hits, the window may open again.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> Meanwhile most tech CEOs have gone quiet about their IPO plans. But Rauch is telegraphing the company\u2019s public market readiness, suggesting that Vercel is eyeing a listing in the not-too-distant future.<\/p>\n When pressed about what Wall Street should know about Vercel, Rauch responded: \u201cThe total addressable market of infrastructure has now grown, and it simply has no ceiling.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cAgents are very prolific at deploying,\u201d Rauch said, adding that 30% of the apps running on the company\u2019s platform already came from agents.<\/p>\n According to Rauch, agents will accelerate software production by making it easier to generate custom solutions than to purchase existing software.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of that software\u2026 it needs to go somewhere, and we think it\u2019s going to be Vercel,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n