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.
“When I started this company, only tens of millions of people could deploy,” Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told the audience at the HumanX conference in San Francisco last week. “Now we’re seeing that everybody in the world can create an app.”
The explosion in app creation by non-developers has been a significant boon to Vercel’s business.
The company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) has skyrocketed from $100 million 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.
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. “Vercel is very much a working public company,” Rauch said.
As for when the debut will happen, he replied: “There’s no perfect timeline or quarter I can give. The company’s ready and getting more ready for it every day.”
2026 was expected to be a strong year 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.
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Meanwhile most tech CEOs have gone quiet about their IPO plans. But Rauch is telegraphing the company’s public market readiness, suggesting that Vercel is eyeing a listing in the not-too-distant future.
When pressed about what Wall Street should know about V …