Vercel

Founded: 2015

Founders: Guillermo Rauch

Industry: Web Infrastructure

Revenue: ~$100M ARR

Valuation: $2.5B

What makes them interesting

Deploy with git push. Made the web faster for everyone, not just the companies that can afford CDN engineers.

Vercel (formerly Zeit) democratized web performance. They took enterprise-level deployment and CDN infrastructure and made it accessible to any developer with a GitHub repository.

The magic moment

git push origin main
# Your site is now live globally with:
# - Automatic HTTPS
# - Global CDN
# - Atomic deployments
# - Preview deployments for every PR

Why they’re winning

• Developer experience: Deployment should be boring
• Performance: Edge network that just works
• Ecosystem: Deep Next.js integration (they created it)
• Previews: Every PR gets its own URL

Their focus on the developer experience - instant deploys, automatic HTTPS, global edge network - set a new standard for what web deployment should feel like.

The bigger picture

They’ve built the infrastructure that powers much of the modern web, while making it simple enough that a solo developer can compete with large engineering teams on performance.

The best infrastructure is invisible infrastructure.

← Back to list