Why Coding Agents Are Choosing Vercel as Often as Humans Do
The rise of AI agents that write software continues to pay off for the companies that host such software. Among them is Vercel, whose software helps developers make and host websites and AI apps, including so-called agents that automate white-collar tasks.
The 11-year-old company is generating $600 million in annualized revenue, or $50 million a month, up 148% from a year earlier and up from $500 million in July. The number of paying customers also rose by a similar amount, around 20%, according to a person close to the company.
Valued at $9.3 billion in a financing a year ago, Vercel has since changed its business model and mostly charges customers based on their usage rather than through subscriptions. The company competes with an array of software firms, including Netlify and Cloudflare, as well as cloud providers like Amazon. And it’s also competing with OpenRouter, soon to be owned by Stripe, in helping app developers pick and choose the right AI models from one application programming interface.
Coding AI agents that produce new code now account for about half of Vercel’s new business, up from less than 3% at the start of the year, CEO Guillermo Rauch said in June at Vercel’s Ship conference in London.
The company has long been known as a platform that helps developers put websites and apps online quickly. It removed much of the technical setup between writing code and getting it live, such as configuring servers and getting security certificates, and managed the infrastructure for customers. Many developers, and now coding agents, such as Claude Code, Cursor or OpenAI’s Codex, default to Vercel as a result, in part because they learned web development largely on Next.js, Vercel’s open-source framework.
Early this year, Vercel repositioned the company around AI agents, rebuilding its infrastructure so agents can easily deploy and run the software they create. “Right place, right time,” a person close to the company said.
“Agents are choosing Vercel alongside humans, and they’re first class builders on the platform” said Glenn Solomon, a managing partner at venture firm Notable Capital, which has backed Vercel. “There‘s more software written in the past few years than in humankind’s history prior - because agents don’t take vacation.”
Vercel counts 485,000 paying customers, according to a person close to the company. Its enterprise customers include Meta, SpaceXAI, Cursor, OpenAI, The Weather Company and Zapier, Vercel says.
Founded in San Francisco in November 2015, Vercel is one of the few infrastructure companies started before ChatGPT that has successfully reoriented its business around the AI boom, and it has done so with the high gross margins typical of software companies, unlike most AI coding startups, whose margins are thin.
One product that draws business to the Vercel hosting business is Next.js, which software engineers use to develop websites. Next.js has been downloaded 1.3 billion times this year through August, including 300 million downloads between July and August alone, according to a person with direct knowledge.
Another free, open-source product is Vercel’s AI software development kit, which helps developers connect their apps to AI models. Rauch has described the AI SDK as “the Next.js of AI.”
The AI SDK is downloaded about 33 million times a week, as of October 1, according to npm, a software registry for JavaScript, making it the third-most-downloaded AI SDK after those made by OpenAI and Anthropic.
Rauch, a longtime advocate of open-source software and the open web, said in April that Vercel wants to file for an initial public offering but hasn't decided on a timeline.