While many startups founded before the advent of ChatGPT are struggling to position themselves for the AI era, Vercel, a decade-old development tools and website hosting platform, is benefiting from the explosion of AI-generated apps and agents.
“When I started this company, we could only deploy tens of millions of people,” Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told an audience at the HumanX conference in San Francisco last week. “We now know that anyone in the world can create an app.”
The surge in app creation by non-developers has been a huge boon to Vercel's business.
According to Forbes, the company's annual recurring revenue (ARR) soared from $100 million in early 2024 to $340 million by the end of February 2026, as reported by The Information.
Given that growth, Rauch was asked on stage about his IPO plans. He suggested that the company already operates according to public body discipline. “Vasel is a truly functioning public company,” Rausch said.
As for when the debut will be, he replied, “There is no perfect schedule or quarter that I can tell you. The company is gearing up and getting ready day by day.”
2026 was expected to be a strong year for new public offerings, but the IPO pipeline was effectively frozen by a software sell-off that fueled fears of AI disruption. With the exception of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, there has been little talk of public release. If any of these companies go public, they are expected to be big hits and the window could open again.
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Meanwhile, many tech company CEOs have remained silent about their IPO plans. However, Rauch has telegraphed the company's readiness for the public markets, suggesting that Vercel is aiming to go public in the not-too-distant future.
When asked what Wall Street should know about Versel, Mr. Rauch said: “The total addressable infrastructure market is now growing, and there is no ceiling to that market.”
Vercel is betting that as more apps are created by AI agents rather than humans, the company will become the primary platform hosting everything agents develop.
“Agents are very good at deployment,” Rauch said, adding that 30% of the apps running on the company's platform are already provided by agents.
According to Rauch, software production is accelerated because agents can more easily generate custom solutions than purchasing existing software.
“All that software… has to go somewhere, and we think that will be Vercel,” he said.
Versel was last valued at $9.3 billion when it raised $300 million in a Series F led by Accel in September. The company competes with Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services for hosting services, and also offers Vibe Coding Tools v0 for creating websites and apps.