Vercel opens applications for six-week AI Accelerator

Vercel has opened applications for its AI Accelerator, a six-week program designed for early-stage AI startups and builders. The company plans to select 40 participants, who will receive access to more than $850,000 in combined credits from Vercel and partner platforms.

Applications are open for two weeks, closing June 30. Selected participants will be announced July 12, with the program running from that date through August 18. An optional in-person meetup in San Francisco, featuring speakers from Vercel and OpenAI, is also planned. The program wraps with a demo day on August 21, where a panel of judges will select three winners to receive over $100,000 in additional credit prizes.

What participants get

Beyond API credits, the accelerator includes access to a private community for discussion and collaboration, weekly coaching sessions with fireside chats and office hours featuring AI startups, investors and builders, plus guides, templates and video resources. Participants also get a chance to showcase their work at demo day, alongside a fireside chat with an investor on fundraising.

Credit breakdown from partners

Credits are spread across a range of AI infrastructure and model providers:

  • Anthropic: Unlimited access to the Claude API.
  • Banana: $18k in credits for deploying AI models on serverless GPUs.
  • Chroma: $11k in credits for its vector database.
  • Cohere: $17k in credits for LLMs and NLP tools.
  • ElevenLabs: $11k in credits for text-to-speech and voice creation APIs.
  • Hugging Face: $15k in credits for running inference on large models with accelerated hardware.
  • Langchain: Early access to the new Langchain platform.
  • Modal: $350k in credits for model deployment, fine-tuning jobs or embedding pipelines.
  • OpenAI: $100k in credits for API usage.
  • Pinecone: $12k in credits for its vector database.
  • Replicate: $350k in credits for running open-source AI models in the cloud or pushing private models.
  • Stability AI: $11k in credits for the Stable Diffusion XL model.
  • Vercel: $35k in credits for hosting, compute, analytics or storage.

Program structure

Over the six weeks, participants will get additional AI content, community connection opportunities and exclusive chats with AI builders. Vercel also plans welcome and midpoint check-ins with selected members to keep the program useful and engaging.

The accelerator is part of Vercel's broader push into AI infrastructure. The company notes that AI companies including Scale, Jasper, Runway, Lexica and Jenni have launched on Next.js and Vercel, and points to its own generative UI tool, V0, as an example of the kind of product the platform supports. Vercel also offers templates and guides for building AI applications on its platform.