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Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch Indicates IPO Readiness Amid AI Revenue Growth

While many startups founded prior to the emergence of ChatGPT are struggling to position themselves for the AI era, Vercel, a 10-year-old development tool and website hosting platform, is benefitting from the explosion of AI-generated apps and agents.

“When I started this company, only tens of millions of people could deploy,” Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch shared with the audience 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 been a significant boon to Vercel’s business model. The company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) has surged from $100 million at the start of 2024, as reported by industry sources, to a run rate of $340 million by the end of February 2026, according to reliable industry insights.

Given this impressive growth, Rauch was asked onstage about his plans for an IPO. He indicated that the company is already operating with the discipline of a public entity, stating, “Vercel is very much a work-in-public company.”

When pressed for a timeline on a potential debut, he replied: “There’s no perfect timeline or quarter I can give. The company’s ready and getting more ready for it every day.”

This year was anticipated to be strong for new listings; however, a sharp sell-off in software stocks, driven by fears of AI disruption, has effectively frozen the IPO pipeline. Aside from notable companies like SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, public debut discussions have largely come to a standstill. Once any of these companies go public, expected to be blockbuster hits, the window may open again for others.

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Meanwhile, many tech CEOs have remained silent regarding their IPO strategies. However, Rauch is clearly signaling Vercel’s public market readiness, suggesting that the company is eyeing a listing in the not-too-distant future.

When asked what Wall Street should know about Vercel, Rauch emphasized, “The total addressable market of infrastructure has now grown, and it simply has no ceiling.”

Vercel is betting that as more applications are created by AI agents instead of humans, it will position itself as the primary platform for hosting everything developed by these agents.

“Agents are very prolific at deploying,” Rauch noted, adding that 30% of the applications running on Vercel’s platform already come from these agents.

According to Rauch, these agents will expedite software production by simplifying the creation of custom solutions compared to purchasing existing software.

“All of that software… it needs to go somewhere, and we think it’s going to be Vercel,” he concluded.

Vercel was last valued at $9.3 billion when it raised $300 million in a Series F funding round led by a prominent venture firm in September. The company competes with notable players such as Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services in the hosting services market, and it also offers v0, a vibe-coding tool for creating websites and applications.

Source: TechCrunch News