Vercel reopens AI Accelerator with a fresh pool of credits and partner prizes

Vercel is once again running its AI Accelerator, a six-week program for early-stage teams building AI products. Applications for the new cohort of 40 startups are open until February 16. The program runs from March 2 to April 16, wraps up with a demo day in San Francisco, and brings its now-usual pile of cloud credits, mentorship sessions, and investor exposure.

Fourteen months after the previous cohort's demo day, Vercel says the format stays largely intact: weekly sessions with industry leaders, access to an exclusive community of AI builders in the Vercel Community, production-focused templates and guides, and check-ins at the program's start and midpoint. VC partners also provide mentorship, and the final demo day lets teams present in front of investors and potential customers.

Credit pool tops $6M

Every accepted startup receives credits from Vercel, v0, AWS, and a range of partner platforms. Finalists can stack additional prizes exceeding $100K per team. The credit distribution across partners and platforms breaks down as follows:

↱ AWS — $1M in Activate credits toward eligible services. ↱ Anthropic — $600K in API credits. ↱ Cartesia — $288K in credits for its voice AI platform. ↱ Cursor — $11K in credits for its AI code editor. ↱ ElevenLabs — $170K in credits for text-to-speech and voice generation APIs. ↱ Hugging Face — $15K in credits for large-model inference and accelerated hardware. ↱ Modal — $350K in credits for model deployment, fine-tuning, and embedding pipelines. ↱ OpenAI — $100K in API credits. ↱ Roboflow — $40K in credits toward building and shipping computer vision models. ↱ WorkOS — $600K in credits for enterprise-grade integrations. ↱ Julius AI — $20K in credits for its AI data analyst. ↱ Sentry — $10K in credits toward application monitoring. ↱ Vanta — $50K in credits for automated security and compliance. ↱ Okta (auth0) — $864K in credits for authentication and identity management. ↱ Browserbase — $24K in credits for headless browser infrastructure. ↱ Supabase — $40K in credits toward its hosted database and backend platform. ↱ Autonoma — $20K in credits for AI-powered UI testing. ↱ Neon — $200K in credits for serverless Postgres. ↱ Corridor — $4K in credits for AI-native code review. ↱ Braintrust — $20K in credits for its LLM evaluation platform. ↱ Notion — $480K in credits for its AI-powered workspace. ↱ v0 — $216K in credits for Vercel's AI web app development tool. ↱ Vercel — $1.2M in credits for building and deploying on the AI Cloud. Participating platforms not listed as credit partners—such as MongoDB and HubSpot, whose leadership spoke at the previous cohort—do not have disclosed credit pools in this announcement.

What the program offers

Beyond credits, this edition includes optional in-person meetups, exclusive AI content, and community connections. Demo day judging involves leaders and investors, with three winners receiving over $100K in extra resources and first place earning an investment from Vercel Ventures. Last year's demo day saw 26 product launches; several participating teams have since raised venture rounds, landed enterprise customers, and formed partnerships.

Vercel positions the program around the developer experience demanded by agentic products: infrastructure that handles deployment, security, and scaling automatically. Recent AI-focused releases—the Workflow DevKit, Sandboxes, Skills.sh, and git support in v0—are part of that push, alongside the underlying Next.js and Vercel platform used by companies like Sensay, Chatbase, and Leonardo.ai.

Eligibility and selection

Applicants must be Vercel customers, be of legal age in their jurisdiction, and commit to the full six weeks. Teams located in regions subject to U.S. sanctions are ineligible. Vercel is looking for pre-seed ideas and says it will judge applications on quality of submission, founder background, and potential for impact and scalability.