Vercel

Guillermo Rauch founded the company in 2015 under the name ZEIT. In 2016, the team launched now to deploy developers’ applications to the cloud. The company focused on shortening the path from development through previews to production, gradually building a business combining framework development with cloud platform services.⁠[1][2]

The team released Next.js in an announcement authored by Naoyuki Kanezawa, Guillermo Rauch and Tony Kovanen. Built on React, Webpack and Babel, the framework combined server-side rendering, page-based application organization and automatic code splitting so developers could build web applications with less configuration.⁠[3]

ZEIT announced its renaming to Vercel and disclosed a $21 million Series A led by Accel and CRV. The rebranding reflected its focus on collaboration and deployment in web development, serving teams using its own frameworks as well as other web development tools.⁠[2]

Vercel raised a $150 million Series D led by GGV Capital at a valuation exceeding $2.5 billion. It disclosed total funding of $313 million after the round. The valuation reflected the terms of that financing transaction.⁠[4]

In June, the company launched the open-source Vercel AI SDK, providing streaming AI interfaces and model-connection tools for JavaScript and TypeScript applications, initially supporting frontend technologies including React and Svelte. It connected model responses with application interactions, reducing repeated implementation of features such as streaming output.⁠[5]

In October, v0 moved from alpha to beta. Users could describe interfaces in natural language, have the system generate React, Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui code, and continue refining the design. This extended the company’s products from deploying code to generating applications.⁠[6]

Code-search tool Grep and its founder Dan Fox joined Vercel in November 2024. In January 2025, Vercel acquired data-visualization component provider Tremor, whose two co-founders joined the team while its components remained open source. The deals added code-search and application-interface capabilities, respectively.⁠[7][8]

Vercel announced a $300 million Series F co-led by Accel and GICGICGIC is a long-term investment management institution wholly owned by the Government of Singapore, established in 1981 and headquartered in Singapore. It is entrusted with investing Singapore’s foreign reserves across equities, fixed income, private equity, real estate, and infrastructure, in order to preserve and enhance the reserves’ international purchasing power. The company is now named GIC Private Limited; its chairman is Lee Hsien Loong and its chief executive officer is Lim Chow Kiat.Open the full entry at a $9.3 billion valuation. A separate tender offer of approximately $300 million, announced at the same time, provided liquidity to existing shareholders; it was distinct from the company’s financing round.⁠[1]

The Gel Data team joined Vercel, including Python core developer Yury Selivanov and contributor Elvis Pranskevichus. Vercel announced support for the Python Software Foundation, core maintainers and community events, alongside improvements to Python application deployment. The arrangement centered on the team and its technical work; the announcement also stated that the Gel Data platform was scheduled to shut down on January 31, 2026, while its open-source components would remain available.⁠[9]

The new v0 shifted its focus further from interface prototypes to deployable applications, adding integration with existing projects, security settings and development workflows. The company positioned it for generating, modifying and deploying applications, rather than only producing static interfaces.⁠[10]

Vercel disclosed that a breach involving third-party Context.ai affected an employee’s Google Workspace account, after which attackers accessed some internal Vercel systems. Investigators found that some environment variables not marked as sensitive might have been read; that designation did not mean their contents lacked sensitive information. Vercel notified affected customers, requested rotation of relevant credentials and investigated with external security teams.⁠[11]

An April 20 update said checks had found no tampering with npm packages maintained by Vercel. The notice continued to update the scope of the incident and response measures.⁠[11]

On June 30, Vercel Services entered public beta, supporting multiple services within one project and combining atomic deployment with internal communication for full applications. On July 7, Vercel announced its acquisition of Better Auth, whose team continued developing open, cross-framework authentication and agent identity products.⁠[12][13]

On July 21, Vercel expanded Vercel Agent’s investigation capabilities and dashboard access for analyzing application issues; changes required approval.⁠[14]

Vercel released Geist Serif, adding a high-contrast display serif to the Geist Sans, Mono and Pixel families. The first release targeted headlines, posters and other large-size uses, with one Regular weight and four dot-shape variants: round, square, triangle and heart. It included 894 glyphs covering 352 Latin-script languages.⁠[15]

The font was available through the Geist package and website. Additional weights, a text face, italics, Cyrillic support and Google Fonts availability remained development plans in the announcement.⁠[15]