- Vercel (formerly known as Zeit) — a startup founded by the creators of the Next.js web framework — announced it has raised $21 million series A funding led by Accel
Vercel (formerly known as Zeit) — a startup founded by the creators of the Next.js web framework — announced it has raised $21 million series A funding led by Accel, CRV. React creator Jordan Walke and GitHub CEO Nat Friedman also joined the round.
What does Vercel do? Vercel’s cloud platform is known for optimizing the entire development and deployment experience for frontend teams. And Vercel provides a Javascript workflow and serverless edge deployment model that redefines developer experience and site performance.
Next.js is the leading React framework chosen by enterprises. And it is a key technology in the Jamstack architecture (JavaScript / APIs / Markup).
Jamstack has been redefining web development by focusing on separating the frontend from the back-end with new abstraction methods that favor a dramatically improved developer experience and site performance. And Next.js was recently a featured project at the Chrome Developer Summit where the Google Chrome team pointed out its work with the Next.js community for build and runtime optimizations that matter most for frontend development.
Over 30,000 production sites at companies like Airbnb, GoDaddy, Hulu, Nike, Ticketmaster, and Uber are running Next.js today.
Key Quotes:
“Vercel is like AWS for the front end. Over the last decade, backend capabilities have evolved rapidly thanks to open source and the public cloud. The front end has lagged. That’s changing with new technology stacks powered by Javascript, React, and web frameworks like Next.js. Because of its impact on customer experience, the front end is becoming much more important. Vercel re-imagines the front end using modern serverless architecture and leading frameworks. Their workflow seamlessly orchestrates code, hosting, testing, and collaboration into a simple, unified experience. Vercel brings huge advantages to front end teams that move fast and ship code frequently.”
-Dan Levine, Partner at Accel
“Front end developers want to create amazing experiences for users, not wrestle with complexities of configuring servers, clusters, compilers, and build systems. We saw an opportunity to re-think the entire workflow for the world’s 11 million Javascript developers, to give them a superior developer experience, and to give their users the best site performance on the web.”
-Guillermo Rauch, co-founder at Vercel
