Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch signals IPO readiness as AI agents fuel revenue surge

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

“When I started this company, only tens of millions of people could be employed,” Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, told the audience at the HumanX conference in San Francisco last week. “Now we see that anyone in the world can create an app.”

The explosion in app creation by non-developers has been a major boon to Vercel’s company.

The company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) has skyrocketed $100 million early 2024, as reported by The Information, to a run rate of $340 million by the end of February 2026, according Forbes.

Given that growth, Rauch was asked on stage about his IPO plans. He suggested that the company already operates with the discipline of a public entity. “Vercel is truly a working public company,” Rauch said.

As for when the debut will take place, he replied: “There is no perfect timeline or quarter that I can give. The company is ready and getting more ready every day.”

2026 was expected to be a strong year for new listings, but a sharp software sell-off, fueled by fears of AI disruption, has effectively frozen the IPO pipeline. Aside from SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, most talk of public debuts has largely disappeared. Once any of these companies go public, all of which are expected to be blockbusters, the window may open again.

Meanwhile, most tech CEOs have been quiet about their IPO plans. But Rauch telegraphs the company’s willingness to enter the public market, suggesting Vercel is eyeing a stock market listing in the not-too-distant future.

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

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 productive in deploying them,” says Rauch, adding that 30% of apps running on the company’s platform already come from agents.

According to Rauch, agents will accelerate software production by making it easier to generate customized solutions than to purchase existing software.

“All that software… it has to go somewhere, and we think it will 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 also offers v0, a vibe coding tool for creating websites and apps.