Vercel

Vercel is the company behind Next.js, the most popular React framework, and provides a cloud platform for deploying and hosting web applications. Founded in 2015 by Guillermo Rauch, the company has raised over 300 million dollars and serves millions of developers, powering websites for companies like OpenAI, Notion, and Loom.

Vercel has positioned itself at the center of the AI application development stack through several AI-focused products. The Vercel AI SDK provides React hooks and streaming utilities for building AI chat interfaces, v0 is an AI-powered UI generation tool that creates React components from text descriptions, and the platform's edge infrastructure is optimized for deploying AI-powered applications with low latency globally.

The piece that reaches furthest beyond Vercel's own hosting is AI Gateway, a managed service that puts hundreds of models from dozens of providers behind a single API key. An application does not have to run on Vercel to use it: any server, cloud or laptop can call the gateway. It routes around a failing provider, falls back across an ordered list of models, records the provider, latency, token usage and cost of every attempt, and enforces spending budgets per team, project or key — and it adds no markup to the providers' own token prices, including for teams that bring their own provider accounts. Its catalogue runs past text into images, video, speech, transcription, embeddings and reranking, and in September 2026 it added evaluation models, which return typed decisions rather than prose.

Vercel's dominance in the React and Next.js ecosystem gives it extraordinary influence over how AI-powered web applications are built. As the framework and hosting platform that most AI startups and SaaS companies use, Vercel both enables and benefits from the explosion of AI-powered web applications — every new AI product built on Next.js deepens the company's ecosystem advantage, and every model reached through its gateway is one more request it sees.