Vercel CEO Signals IPO Readiness Amid AI-Driven Growth

Vercel, a 10-year-old dev tool and website hosting platform, is benefiting from the explosion of AI-generated apps and agents. CEO Guillermo Rauch believes the company is ready for an IPO, citing the growth of AI-generated apps and agents.

While many startups founded prior to the emergence of ChatGPT are struggling to position themselves for the AI era, Vercel is thriving. The company's annual recurring revenue (ARR) has skyrocketed from $100 million at the beginning of 2024 to a run rate of $340 million by the end of February 2026.

Rauch was asked onstage about his IPO plans at the HumanX conference in San Francisco last week. He suggested the company is already operating with the discipline of a public entity, saying, "Vercel is very much a working public company." However, he declined to provide a specific timeline for the IPO.

As for when the debut will happen, he replied: "There's no perfect timeline or quarter I can give. The company's ready and getting more ready for it every day."

The sharp sell-off in software, fueled by the fear of AI disruption, has effectively frozen the IPO pipeline. Despite this, Rauch remains optimistic about Vercel's prospects. "The total addressable market of infrastructure has now grown, and it simply has no ceiling," he said.

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. "Agents are very prolific at deploying," Rauch said, adding that 30% of the apps running on the company's platform already came from agents.

According to Rauch, agents will accelerate software production by making it easier to generate custom solutions than to purchase existing software. "All of that software… it needs to go somewhere, and we think it's going to be Vercel," he said.

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.