A Six-Week Sprint for 39 Early-Stage AI Teams

The Vercel AI Accelerator has selected 39 early-stage teams from the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America for its 2026 program. Over the next six weeks, these founders will build on Vercel’s self-driving infrastructure, with access to more than $8M in partner credits from AWS, Anthropic, OpenAI, Cartesia, and ElevenLabs, among others. Participants also receive weekly sessions with technical leaders and dedicated mentorship from VC partners.

The 2026 Cohort

The selected companies span a wide range of industries and maturity levels, united by a focus on shipping AI products now. Companies building openly include:

  • Alloy (Founder: Joe Harris) — Turns terabytes of robot data into debugging, analysis, and reporting tools.
  • Archival (Founders: Pablo Diaz-Granados, Jay Katyan, Griffin Ogura) — Provides workflow-level visibility and analytics so leaders can improve AI adoption and ROI.
  • Ares (Founder: Tony Hunter) — A revenue command center with agents that work across customer data to find, engage, close, and grow revenue.
  • Blueprints AI (Founders: Al Dram, Coco Cao) — An autonomous agent that generates construction blueprints.
  • Carbyn AI (Founders: Jungkeun Hong, Tim Phuan) — AI glasses that capture tribal knowledge and coach machinists in real time.
  • Cloudglue (Founders: Amy Xiao, Kevin Dela Rosa) — A context layer enabling users, agents, and applications to work with video at scale.
  • CodeYam (Founders: Nadia Eldeib, Jared Cosulich) — Uses simulations to power an AI-native software development experience.
  • Coreviz (Founder: Wassim Gharbi) — An AI-native workspace that understands, organizes, and edits photos and videos.
  • Grid58 (Founders: Mani HK, Sures Kumar TS) — An operating system for software creation, covering research, design, and code.
  • Hacktron AI (Founders: Zayne Zhang, Mohan Pedhapati, Harsh Jaiswal) — An AI security teammate integrated into the development lifecycle to find and remediate exploitable vulnerabilities.
  • HiveBase (Founders: Nick Bae, Tim Tong) — An AI chief of staff that connects tools into agents running code, marketing, GTM, and strategy.
  • Hotfix (Founders: Sam Forrester, Evan Eissler, Jack Neil) — An AI production operator that connects to codebases and cloud infrastructure to fix issues as they occur.
  • Integrated Reasoning (Founder: David Cox) — Building ARROW, a wafer-scale solver for mixed integer linear programming.
  • Judea (Founder: Maggie Chen) — An autonomous agent that optimizes a product on autopilot, requiring only a defined target metric.
  • Kinect (Founders: Kratik Agrawal, Varun Kandula) — Dynamic storefronts that adapt to each visitor, human or agent.
  • Kuvia (Founders: Martina Belluomini, Ana Gorodisch) — AI for digital pathology to detect cancer biomarkers and expand access to precision care.
  • Lane (Founders: Jack Clark, Jorge Armenta) — Payments and commerce infrastructure allowing AI agents to buy on a user's behalf.
  • Mighty (Founders: Johnny Hung, Munam Wasi) — A security gateway that protects AI agents from fraud across text, images, and documents in real time.
  • Milq (Founders: Juan Djuwadi, Neel Makhecha) — A Mac app for building Swift applications, positioned as “Lovable for iOS.”
  • Niyam AI (Founders: Samarth Shyam, Agrim Singh) — A control plane for hardware manufacturing.
  • Nura (Founder: Usman Ahmed) — An AI copilot for real estate development, automating zoning, feasibility, and pro forma analysis.
  • OpenVet (Founder: Adam Sager) — An AI hospital building the first outcome-based biological dataset across all animal species.
  • Orchestra Research (Founders: Zechen Zhang, Amber Jiachen Liu) — Aiming to build a “Jarvis for Science” to democratize research.
  • Pai (Founders: Gigi Grimes, Everhett Grimes) — Creates digital twins of real customers for testing products, ads, and messaging.
  • Partly (Founders: Shivani Bajaj, Shantanu Prakash) — A data intelligence layer for agent-assisted hardware commerce.
  • Penelope Health (Founders: Sohum Patel, Mattijs De Paepe) — An API and MCP layer for US medical payments, using payer policy data to reduce claim denials.
  • ProxieLabs (Founders: Alex Junod, Cristian Besliu) — Replaces slow market research with AI-powered conjoint analysis for consumer preference data.
  • Rex (Founders: Merlin Kafka, Lewis Blackwood) — An AI platform for operational finance, unifying customer context to automate AR processes.
  • Roots (Founders: Lauren Self, David Golovin) — A platform for buying and selling homes, saving buyers hundreds monthly and sellers thousands at closing.
  • Sentia Labs (Founders: Akshay Murthy, Sarthak Gupta) — A behavioral intelligence layer for product teams.
  • Smithery (Founders: Henry Mao, Anirudh Kamath) — Connectivity infrastructure for the agent economy.
  • Takeoff (Founder: Brad Bitler) — An AI travel platform for trip planning, connecting hotels and brands at the moment of discovery.
  • Truli (Founders: Catherine Zhou, Michael Wu) — AI agents that help food, supplement, and beverage brands maintain compliance.
  • Vakoi AI (Founders: Ao Fu, Gagan Devagiri) — Customized immersive ads within video games at scale.
  • Zomma (Founders: Jihyun Kim, Cashel Fitzgerald) — A computer-use agent for sales and application support, grounded in enterprise SOPs.

Not all participating teams are listed; several are building in stealth.

From Builder Day to Demo Day

The program kicks off publicly on March 18th with Builder Day at Vercel’s new San Francisco headquarters. The event includes a fireside chat between Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch and Paper CEO Stephen Haney, along with office hours with accelerator partners.

Following Builder Day, teams have four weeks to refine and ship their products before Demo Day on April 16th in San Francisco. Each team will present to AI leaders, VCs, and builders, with judges selecting three winners. Prizes exceed $100K in credits from Vercel and partners, and the first-place team receives an investment from Vercel Ventures.

Previous accelerator teams, including Stably AI, Cervo, and Bear AI, have gone on to raise venture rounds and land enterprise customers through the program.