Why Coding Agents Are Choosing Vercel as Often as Humans Do

The rise of AI agents that write software continues to pay off for the companies that host such software. Among them is Vercel, whose software helps developers make and host websites and AI apps, including so-called agents that automate white-collar tasks.

The 11-year-old company is generating $600 million in annualized revenue, or $50 million a month, up 148% from a year earlier and up from $500 million in July. The number of paying customers also rose by a similar amount, around 20%, according to a person close to the company.

Valued at $9.3 billion in a financing a year ago, Vercel has since changed its business model and mostly charges customers based on their usage rather than through subscriptions. The company competes with an array of software firms, including Netlify and Cloudflare, as well as cloud providers like Amazon. And it’s also competing with OpenRouter, soon to be owned by Stripe, in helping app developers pick and choose the right AI models from one application programming interface.

Coding AI agents that produce new code now account for about half of Vercel’s new business, up from less than 3% at the start of the year, CEO Guillermo Rauch said in June at Vercel’s Ship conference in London.

The company has long been known as a platform that helps developers put websites and apps online quickly. It removed much of the technical setup between writing code and getting it live, such as configuring servers and getting security certificates, and managed the infrastructure for customers. Many developers, and now coding agents, such as Claude Code, Cursor or OpenAI’s Codex, default to Vercel as a result, in part because they learned web development largely on Next.js, Vercel’s open-source framework.

Early this year, Vercel repositioned the company around AI agents, rebuilding its infrastructure so agents can easily deploy and run the software they create. “Right place, right time,” a person close to the company said.

“Agents are choosing Vercel alongside humans, and they’re first class builders on the platform” said Glenn Solomon, a managing partner at venture firm Notable Capital, which has backed Vercel. “There‘s more software written in the past few years than in humankind’s history prior - because agents don’t take vacation.”

Vercel counts 485,000 paying customers, according to a person close to the company. Its enterprise customers include Meta, SpaceXAI, Cursor, OpenAI, The Weather Company and Zapier, Vercel says.

Founded in San Francisco in November 2015, Vercel is one of the few infrastructure companies started before ChatGPT that has successfully reoriented its business around the AI boom, and it has done so with the high gross margins typical of software companies, unlike most AI coding startups, whose margins are thin.

One product that draws business to the Vercel hosting business is Next.js, which software engineers use to develop websites. Next.js has been downloaded 1.3 billion times this year through August, including 300 million downloads between July and August alone, according to a person with direct knowledge.

Another free, open-source product is Vercel’s AI software development kit, which helps developers connect their apps to AI models. Rauch has described the AI SDK as “the Next.js of AI.”

The AI SDK is downloaded about 33 million times a week, as of October 1, according to npm, a software registry for JavaScript, making it the third-most-downloaded AI SDK after those made by OpenAI and Anthropic.

Rauch, a longtime advocate of open-source software and the open web, said in April that Vercel wants to file for an initial public offering but hasn't decided on a timeline.

Here’s what else is going on…

Big Number

Memory maker Micron said revenue nearly quintupled to $54.2 billion in the quarter ending Sept.3, as demand for high-bandwidth memory hardware for AI chips showed no sign of slowing down.

Overheard

Meta Platforms’ Muse now has more than 3 million users who give the AI agent at least one prompt a week, according to internal data reviewed by The Information, giving the product a sizable active audience just weeks after its launch.

OpenAI said it recently identified and mitigated a “coordinated model-distillation campaign” involving individuals associated with Moonshot AI, the Chinese developer of Kimi models.

DeepSeek said Wednesday that it would open-source software tools that are customized for Huawei’s AI chips, as the Chinese AI firm steps up its efforts to use domestic semiconductors for training and running its models.

Some of the largest lenders to the artificial intelligence build out, including banks SocGen and MUFG, are becoming more choosy about the deals they take on as market volatility and rising yields give lenders reasons to choose safer deals over more speculative ones.

People on the Move

Microsoft veteran Peter Lee, who for years led the company’s internal research unit, will leave the company, he announced Wednesday. Lee is the latest in a string of senior executive departures from Microsoft announced this year. So far this year, Office and Windows boss Rajesh Jha, Xbox CEO Phil Spencer, chief communications officer Frank Shaw and security chief Charlie Bell have announced plans to leave the company.

Deals and Debuts

See The Information’s Generative AI Database for an exclusive list of private companies and their investors.

ElevenLabs let employees and early investors sell $300 million of stock in a tender offer co-led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price, doubling the AI voice startup's valuation to $22 billion from the $11 billion it hit in a February funding round.

Tencent signed a five-year, roughly $7 billion lease with Oracle for access to about 100,000 advanced AI chips unavailable in China, routed through Oracle data centers in Southeast Asia, with roughly 30% paid upfront — the Chinese tech giant's largest overseas cloud deal.

PaleBlueDot AI is in talks with lenders including Brookfield Asset Management for $600 million in private credit to buy chips for a South Korea site whose compute will serve Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu.

CScale, which builds optical interconnect for AI data centers, emerged from stealth with $145 million in a Series C funding round led by Atreides Management and Premji Invest.

Metaview, which uses AI agents to automate recruiting, raised $60 million in a Series C funding round led by Insight Partners.

Flow Engineering, which builds AI tools for hardware design, raised $50 million in a Series B funding round at a $750 million valuation led by Valor Equity Partners’ Antonio Gracias and Atreides Management's Gavin Baker.

Miter, which makes an AI-powered payroll and operations platform for construction, raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Battery Ventures.

Restate, which helps AI agents recover automatically from crashes mid-task, raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Singular.

Kanu AI, which turns workers’ daily tasks into automated software, raised $11.7 million in funding led by Trilogy Equity Partners.

Inbolt, which gives factory robots real-time 3D vision, raised €11 million in funding led by Shift4Good.

Zenithon, which builds AI models that simulate extreme physics for fusion reactors and rockets, raised $10 million in seed funding led by Backed VC.

Beltic, which verifies the identity of AI agents before they're allowed to transact, raised $7.3 million in seed funding led by Norwest.

Clio, a legal practice-management platform, acquired Learned Hand, which makes AI tools for judges and court clerks, marking Clio's first direct expansion into the judiciary.

Google launched Gemini 4 Argon, its latest flagship AI model, touting its abilities in cybersecurity defense and coding, legal and finance work. The company hasn’t launched such a frontier model in nearly a year, prompting questions about whether it could stay in the race with Anthropic and OpenAI.

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Alix Coutures is a reporter covering digital advertising focused on OpenAI, Google and AI startups, based in New York City. She can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at Alix_coutures.49