While many startups founded prior to the emergence of ChatGPT are struggling to position themselves for the AI era, Vercel, a 10-year-old dev tool and website hosting platform, is benefiting from the explosion of AI-generated apps and agents.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cWhen I started this company, only tens of millions of people could deploy,\u201d Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told the audience at the HumanX<\/a> conference in San Francisco last week. \u201cNow we’re seeing that everybody in the world can create an app.\u201d<\/p>\n\n The explosion in app creation<\/a> by non-developers has been a significant boon to Vercel\u2019s business.<\/p>\n\n The company\u2019s annual recurring revenue (ARR) has skyrocketed from $100 million<\/a> at the beginning of 2024, as reported by The Information, to a run rate of $340 million by the end of February 2026, according to Forbes<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n Given that growth, Rauch was asked onstage about his IPO plans. He suggested the company is already operating with the discipline of a public entity. \u201cVercel is very much a work-in-public company,\u201d Rauch said.<\/p>\n\n As for when the debut will happen, he replied: \u201cThere’s no perfect timeline or quarter I can give. The company\u2019s ready and getting more ready for it every day.\u201d<\/p>\n\n This year was expected to be strong for new listings, but a sharp sell-off in software, fueled by the fear of AI disruption, has effectively frozen the IPO pipeline. Aside from SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, most talk of public debuts has largely ceased. Once any of those company’s go public, all expected to be blockbuster hits, the window may open again.<\/p>\n