Our Investment in Vercel

Fourteen years ago, Amazon announced S3, an early service offered by Amazon’s new cloud business, AWS. It directly targeted developers. Companies targeting developers and their infrastructure have become some of the most valuable in the world as exemplified by the APX wave amongst others.

Today, I am happy to announce that we have led the Series A in Vercel. We believe Vercel can do for the 11 million frontend developers what AWS accomplished for backend developers.

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For developers today, the frontend is more important than ever. Customers expect rich, lightning-fast applications on the web as they’ve come to expect from mobile apps. But frontend app frameworks and infrastructure to provide that experience have lagged. Vercel is dedicated to providing that tooling for frontend devs.  

There are only so many opportunities to back a dominant platform framework. Vercel is built on the success of its open source framework Next.js, used by more than 300,000 developers today. Next.js already helps power the frontend experience at some of the most highly-trafficked websites in the world: AT&T, British Airways, GitHub, Hilton, Hulu, National Geographic, Nike, Red Bull, Ticketmaster, Twitch, Uber, Zillow, and more.

The Vercel team has a decade-long track record of creating amazing things that make developers more productive including MooTools and Socket.io. With Vercel, they are building a beautiful and seamless way to create rich frontend applications. They are driving a big shift in the industry and the ultimate winners, besides developers, will be end users and content creators.

-- Dan Levine