Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch hints at IPO as AI agents boost revenue

Unlike many startups founded before ChatGPT that now struggle to find their footing in the AI era, Vercel, a decade-old development tool and website hosting platform, is thriving due to the surge of AI-generated applications and autonomous agents.

“When I started this company, only tens of millions of people could deploy,” Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told attendees at the HumanX conference in San Francisco last week. “Now we’re seeing that everybody in the world can create an app.”

The rapid increase in app creation by non-developers has significantly boosted Vercel’s business.

According to Forbes, the company’s annual recurring revenue jumped from $100 million at the start of 2024, as reported by The Information, to a run rate of $340 million by the end of February 2026.

With that momentum, Rauch was asked onstage about his IPO timeline. He indicated the company already operates with the rigor of a publicly traded firm. “Vercel is very much a working public company,” Rauch said.

When asked when that debut might occur, he replied: “There’s no perfect timeline or quarter I can give. The company’s ready and getting more ready for it every day.”

2026 was widely expected to be a strong year for new listings, but a steep sell-off in software stocks, driven by fears of AI disruption, has largely stalled the IPO pipeline. Beyond SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, discussions of public offerings have mostly quieted. Once any of those companies go public—all anticipated to be major events—the window could reopen.

Meanwhile, most tech CEOs have remained cautious about discussing their IPO plans. Rauch, however, is signaling Vercel’s readiness for public markets, suggesting the company may be eyeing a listing in the near future.

Pressed on what Wall Street should understand about Vercel, Rauch responded: “The total addressable market of infrastructure has now grown, and it simply has no ceiling.”

Vercel is betting that as more applications are built by AI agents rather than humans, the company will become the go-to platform for hosting everything those agents create.

“Agents are very prolific at deploying,” Rauch said, noting that 30% of the apps running on Vercel’s platform already originate from agents.

According to Rauch, agents will accelerate software development by making it easier to generate custom solutions than to buy 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 round led by Accel in September. The company competes with Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services in hosting, and also offers v0, a vibe coding tool for building websites and applications.