Vercel’s journey is the ultimate blueprint for turning open-source passion into a multi-billion dollar empire. In 2025, the company officially reached a massive $9.3 billion valuation, tripling its previous worth in a single year.
Founded in 2015 by Guillermo Rauch (originally as ZEIT), Vercel solved a problem that every developer in the late 2010s faced: deployment was a nightmare..
Here is how a high school dropout from Argentina built the foundation of the modern web.
đź’° Vercel by the Numbers: The "AI Cloud" Era
| Metric | The 2026 Reality |
| Current Valuation | $9.3 Billion |
| Annualized Revenue (ARR) | ~$172 Million (as of Feb 2025) |
| Active Users | 6 Million+ |
| Total Funding | $863 Million |
| Key Flagship Product | Next.js (Used by Nike, OpenAI, and TikTok) |
The Founder’s Journey: From Buenos Aires to Billionaire
Guillermo Rauch didn't follow the typical Stanford-to-Startup path. Growing up in a suburb of Buenos Aires, he taught himself to code on a Windows 95 PC brought home by his father.
By 11, he was hacking Linux; by 18, he moved to San Francisco on an O-1 "Extraordinary Ability" visa, which he secured by literally writing a book on Node.js to prove his expertise.
