Exclusive-Vercel completes $250 million Series E round at $3.25 billion valuation
By Anna Tong
(Reuters) - Vercel, a software startup that provides a platform for building cloud-based web applications, on Thursday said it has raised $250 million in a Series E funding round that values the company at $3.25 billion.
The round was led by Accel with participation from existing investors CRV, GV, Notable Capital, Bedrock, Geodesic Capital, Tiger Global, 8VC and SV Angel, the startup said.
Vercel said it recently exceeded $100 million in annual revenue and that every month more than 1 million software developers use its Next.js technology, an open-source framework for building web applications.
The San Francisco-based firm makes it easy for "non tech-native" companies to migrate and deploy websites to cloud infrastructure and improve their websites' loading speeds, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told Reuters in an interview.
"The cloud is really powerful, but it's like being handed a bag of 3,000 Legos," he said. "Vercel automates all of that away."
Rauch said large enterprises such as U.S. apparel maker Under Armour migrated to cloud infrastructure using Vercel and that other customers include startups Perplexity and OpenAI.
Vercel said it will use the funds to build out its v0 product, which leverages generative artificial intelligence to build user interfaces from text descriptions.
Users can tell v0 what they want their websites to look like and v0 will generate the code, eliminating the need for coding skills.
The goal of v0 is to enable companies to instantly generate personalized websites, Rauch said.
Vercel, founded in 2015, also said it intends to enhance its security products.
(Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Christopher Cushing)
