Vercel opens applications for its 2025 AI Accelerator
Vercel is accepting applications for the second edition of its AI Accelerator program, a six-week initiative for teams building AI applications. The program runs from June 9 to July 18 and will work with 40 selected teams. Applications close May 17.
The program is backed by more than $4 million in credits distributed across Vercel, AWS, v0, and a broad set of AI platforms. Participants receive credits, access to a private builder community, weekly coaching sessions with AI startups and investors, and the chance to present at a demo day in front of industry leaders and venture capitalists. An optional in-person meetup in San Francisco is also planned.
What participants get
Every selected team receives thousands of dollars in service credits. Finalists can earn an additional $100K or more in credit prizes. The breakdown of partner credits is as follows:
Notable credits include $1.2M from Vercel for building on its AI Cloud, $1M in AWS Activate credits, $600K from Anthropic for API usage, and $475K from Perplexity. Additional credits come from Daytona ($625K), Modal ($350K), Cartesia ($288K), and v0 ($216K), alongside support from ElevenLabs, Fal, Groq, Hugging Face, Hyperbolic, Langbase and Chai, Mistral AI, OpenAI, and others.
Program structure
The accelerator runs for six weeks, with the program concluding at a demo day on July 18. Three winners are selected by judges to receive over $100K in credits and swag from Vercel and partner companies. The first-place team also receives an investment from Vercel Ventures. Selected members participate in welcome and mid-point check-ins.
The inaugural cohort included early-stage teams such as Jenni and Memorang. Vercel's previous demo day featured product launches from 40 AI teams and drew thousands of viewers.
Why Vercel is running the program
Companies including Scale AI, Leonardo AI, and Runway build on Vercel using Next.js. The company positions the accelerator as a way to support developers building AI products with its infrastructure, including the AI SDK, Chat SDK, Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, and templates. Teams can apply through the Vercel website until the May 17 deadline.
