Guillermo Rauch

Rauch grew up in Lanús, in the Buenos Aires area of Argentina. In his personal biography and in interviews he has recalled discovering Linux and open-source software early on, learning programming and English from online resources, and then taking part in the MooTools community. Publishing code and collaborating with the community became an important way for him to gain development experience and find career opportunities.⁠[1][2]

At 18 he moved to San Francisco to work as a front-end engineer. He went on to co-found the education software company LearnBoost and to work on the file-sharing product Cloudup, and his technical work broadened from front-end interfaces to real-time communication, data tools and application infrastructure.⁠[1]

Rauch published Smashing Node.js: JavaScript Everywhere, a 320-page book issued by Wiley with the ISBN 9781119962595. The book covers building applications with JavaScript and Node.js; the publisher described him at the time as co-founder and chief technology officer of LearnBoost.⁠[3]

On September 25, Automattic announced its acquisition of Cloudup, a product for drag-and-drop uploads, media sharing and syncing across devices. In his biography Rauch lists LearnBoost and Cloudup as his main ventures before founding Vercel.⁠[4][1]

In 2015 Rauch founded ZEIT, which was later renamed Vercel. In 2016 the team launched the deployment product now. That October he, Naoyuki Kanezawa and Tony Kovanen jointly announced the open-source Next.js, a framework that combined server-side rendering, page organization and code splitting for React applications.⁠[5][6][7]

He also created or co-developed open-source projects including Socket.IO, Mongoose, Hyper and SWR, covering real-time communication, database modeling, terminal interfaces and web data fetching. Together with his later cloud platform venture, these projects form the through line of his career in developer tools.⁠[1]

Rauch announced that ZEIT had been renamed Vercel and disclosed a $21 million Series A round. The company kept its focus on development collaboration, application previews and the deployment experience, and under his leadership went on to expand its hosting services and framework ecosystem.⁠[6]

With Rauch as chief executive, Vercel announced a $40 million Series B led by GV in December 2020, with new investors including Greenoaks CapitalGreenoaksGreenoaks is an American investment firm co-founded by Neil Mehta in 2012 and known for concentrated, long-term investing; it made an early, large bet on the Korean e-commerce company Coupang and has invested in companies including Wiz, Stripe, Databricks, and Anthropic. In May 2026, it co-led Anthropic’s $65 billion Series H funding round with Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, and Sequoia Capital.Open the full entry, Bedrock Capital and Geodesic Capital alongside Accel and CRV; a $150 million Series D led by GGV Capital at a $2.5 billion valuation in November 2021, bringing its total funding to $313 million; and a $250 million Series E led by AccelAccelAccel is a venture capital firm co-founded in 1983 by Arthur Patterson and Jim Swartz. It invests through regional teams and early-stage, growth and late-stage funds, with operations in the United States, Europe, Israel and India. Its investment history includes Facebook, Flipkart, Atlassian, Slack and other technology businesses. Fundraising totals, regulatory assets under management and portfolio-company transaction values are distinct measures.Open the full entry at a $3.25 billion valuation in May 2024. In the Series D announcement Rauch called the pace of platform usage and market expansion “simply astounding.”⁠[8][9][10]

Vercel launched the AI SDK in June and took v0 into beta in October. The first gives developers tools for building interactive AI applications, and the second generates editable interface code from natural language, broadening the product range of the company Rauch leads.⁠[11][12]

In August, Socket, a company focused on open-source dependency security, announced a $20 million Series A in which Rauch took part as an existing investor, alongside participants including Dylan FieldDylan FieldDylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma and an angel investor. He studied computer science and mathematics at Brown University, explored browser-based design tools with Evan Wallace, and founded Figma in 2012 with support from the Thiel Fellowship. His personal history also includes collecting digital art and investing in companies such as Mercury and Socket.Open the full entry and Aaron LevieAaron LevieAaron Levie is an American enterprise software entrepreneur and angel investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of Box. He co-founded Box in 2005, led the company’s shift from an online file-sharing service to enterprise content management, and took the company public in 2015.Open the full entry. The amount is the size of the whole round; the announcement did not disclose Rauch’s individual investment. Socket is a software supply chain security company.⁠[13]

In September 2023 the project management software company Linear announced a $35 million Series B led by Accel, and listed Guillermo Rauch, as CEO of Vercel, among the customers who had become Linear investors.⁠[14]

In September Vercel closed a $300 million Series F at a $9.3 billion valuation. In a Stripe interview released in December, Rauch looked back on his path from the open-source community to building companies, and described reducing the complex steps between building an application and putting it live in the cloud as a long-standing focus.⁠[5][2]

On December 2 Vercel announced that the Gel Data team was joining the company. It also disclosed that an investment fund associated with Rauch had made a passive investment in Gel Data, and that the acquisition was approved by an independent M&A committee of the board on which Rauch did not sit, separating his role as an executive from the fund’s investment.⁠[15]

With Rauch as chief executive, Vercel updated v0 in February, opened a public beta of multi-service deployments in June, acquired Better Auth in July, and continued to expand its agent for investigating applications. Its developer tools grew from front-end deployment to cover application generation, authentication and runtime management.⁠[16][17][18][19]

Vercel announced the general availability of Vercel Shop, an open-source Next.js storefront template built on ShopifyShopifyShopify is a commerce software company that originated in Ottawa, Canada, providing merchants with tools for online stores, physical retail, payments, orders and inventory management. The business began with Snowdevil, an online snowboard store founded in 2004 by Tobias Lütke and others, and the standalone e-commerce platform launched in 2006. The company went public in 2015 and now trades under the ticker SHOP on Nasdaq and the Toronto Stock Exchange.Open the full entry’s rebuilt Hydrogen SDK, which now works across JavaScript frameworks. Product pages expose machine-readable price, availability and options to search engines and AI agents, and agents can search products and build carts over MCP. Rauch said in the announcement that the storefront runs on Next.js, is built on Shopify, and is “freaking fast.”⁠[20]

Delphi released an interview with Rauch on YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry. The host said the Delphi team had moved its infrastructure from AWS to Vercel during a codebase migration about six months earlier. Rauch said he started Vercel because configuring infrastructure felt tedious when he first used cloud services and he wanted to automate that work, which he once called “self-driving infrastructure” and now calls “agentic infrastructure.” He said startups should side with the new wave of technology, and that he hopes one day to see one person with AI agents build a trillion-dollar company on Vercel.⁠[21][21][21][21]

He recalled that Vercel first went to market as “AWS but better,” a positioning that was too broad, and that it later proved its value first in e-commerce, where a faster website translates directly into more revenue for merchants; he said the headless architecture he had promoted for years is now widely adopted because of coding agents. He described trust as one of the most valuable moats for companies after artificial general intelligence, but called trust an “output” of work rather than an “input,” coming mainly from basics such as security, fixing bugs, simplifying the experience and improving documentation.⁠[21][21][21][21][21]

He said the company has a SlackSlackSlack is a team communication and collaboration platform developed from an internal tool at Tiny Speck. It organizes work through channels, direct messages, searchable history and integrations, with features including Huddles, Clips, Canvas and AI assistance. Its paid service launched in February 2014, and Salesforce completed its acquisition in July 2021.Open the full entry channel called “scream” for collecting employees’ complaints about the internal development experience, and that he has turned on high-priority notifications for it. He also said that coding agents and Vercel deployments had let the company drop four or five software vendors, argued for removing tools that agents cannot call, and compared MCP to a new HTTP; he mentioned that he has invested in several companies building fully autonomous businesses on Vercel.⁠[21][21][21][21][21]

In the 2026 Delphi interview Rauch said the hardest moment of his career came when he was very young and running his first startup alone in San Francisco: a fire started at night by a neighbor’s smoking burned the home where he lived, he lost all his personal belongings, and two people in the building were badly injured. He said the experience led him to meditation and spirituality and made him value everyday life more. In the same interview he said he has six children, and that he hopes to help them find their interests and build strong foundations before learning to use AI agents as tools that extend their thinking and creativity.⁠[21][21][21][21]

Vercel: Website: https://vercel.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[22]