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Forbes Daily Briefing

This Argentine Billionaire’s Startup Vercel Is One Of Claude Code’s Go-To Web Hosting Tools

Forbes Daily Briefing

Forbes

Business, Tech News, News

4.418 Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2026

⏱️ 6 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Vercel isn’t a household name like OpenAI or Google, but it’s a crucial vendor for some of the world’s biggest brands, including Under Armour, Stripe and Sonos, who use Vercel to host their digital infrastructures. (One of the most popular ways to view the Epstein Files, an interface called Jmail that mimics a Gmail inbox, is hosted on Vercel.) In September, the company raised $300 million, co-led by blueblood venture firm Accel and GIC, one of Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds. The fundraising round lifted the startup’s valuation to $9.3 billion, up from $3.25 billion the year before. The influx of cash also makes Rauch, an Argentine immigrant, a billionaire, worth at least $2.1 billion, according to Forbes estimates. Vercel is certainly benefiting from its ties to Claude Code. It’s not because of any sort of commercial relationship. Instead, it’s Vercel’s popularity in the developer ecosystem that has organically turned it into a go-to web hosting tool for Claude. One of the most popular ways to build websites is through an open source framework called Next.js, a tool built and maintained by Vercel. As a result, language models like Claude have become very good at writing Next.js code, thanks to the training data fed into the models. So when a user vibe codes an app, Vercel becomes the natural tool for Claude to suggest when it comes time to deploy. “LLMs seem to love Vercel, and we love them back,” says Accel partner Dan Levine, an early Vercel backer.  It’s early, but the boost from Claude Code is taking shape. Vercel clients that use Claude represent a little over 1% of users, but they generate almost 15% of overall Vercel deployments. More broadly, Vercel deployments that come from apps vibe coded by AI agents — everything from to-do list apps to customer service bots — have grown too, from almost 5% in June 2025 to more than 21% in February. Of those deployments made by agents, almost 70% of them come from Claude Code. The boom from AI coding has helped to spike sales for Vercel. Run-rate GAAP revenue hit $340 million at the end of February, up 86% year over year, the company told Forbes.  By Richard Nieva, Senior Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Today on Forbes, this Argentine billionaire startup Vercel is one of Claude Cod's go-to web hosting tools.

0:08.6

Shortly after Anthropic released its AI model Opus 4.5, the CEO of Bersel, Guillermo Roche,

0:16.3

held an all-hands meeting in January at his company's headquarters in San Francisco.

0:22.2

He started with slides outlining key moments in the history of AI coding. GitHub co-pilot in 2021, noting, quote,

0:29.4

it could barely complete code. Chat GPT a year later, noting, quote, a killer use case,

0:35.3

an Anthropics Sonnet 3.5 in 2024, noting, quote, a killer use case, an Anthropics Sonnet 3.5 in 2024,

0:39.3

noting, quote, could clearly be trusted with smaller bits of code.

0:43.3

Opus 4.5 felt like another milestone.

0:46.7

Roche recalls telling his staff, quote, this is going to be a big moment for the world.

0:51.9

By the time Opus 4.6 was released in February, it triggered the so-called, quote,

0:57.4

SaaSpocalypse, wiping away billions of dollars in value from software-ass service stocks as

1:02.8

investors worried those firms could be automated away.

1:06.1

It was a jump scare for the market, but maybe good news for Versailles, which helps developers build,

1:12.3

deploy, and host web apps, and now AI agents.

1:16.2

It's a classic Picks and Shovel story.

1:18.9

With a glut of new code generated by AI, someone has to host it.

1:23.9

Roche says, quote, we've seen a tremendous acceleration on deployments.

1:28.3

Fundamentally, we want to become the infrastructure layer of this new generation of software.

1:34.3

Versel isn't a household name like OpenAI or Google, but it's a crucial vendor for major brands, including Under Armour, Stripe, and Sonos. One of the most popular ways to view the Epstein files, an interface called J-mail that mimics

1:50.1

a Gmail inbox, is hosted on Bursale.

1:53.3

In September, the company raised $300 million, lifting its valuation to $9.3 billion, up from

2:00.3

$3.25 billion the year before.

...

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