28 AI startups, 3 minutes each
The Vercel AI Accelerator wrapped up its inaugural cohort with a Demo Day earlier this week, spotlighting 28 teams that spent six weeks building and launching new products. Each team had three minutes to present their work. The full recording is available here.
From 1,500 applications to 40 teams
The accelerator, announced in June, drew more than 1,500 applications. Only 40 teams were accepted — roughly 2.5% of all applicants. Over the six-week program, the cohort built new products and features, attended a kickoff meetup in San Francisco, participated in over 15 fireside chats with AI experts and VCs, and posted weekly updates in the program's Discord. Some teams scaled to hundreds of thousands of users during the period; others went from idea to a full MVP in just a few weeks.
From the 40 participants, 28 were selected to pitch at Demo Day, with the four judges evaluating the presentations: Nat Friedman (Investor and former CEO of GitHub), Lin Qiao (CEO of Fireworks.ai and former lead of PyTorch), Guillermo Rauch (CEO of Vercel), and Shyamal Anadkat (Member of GTM at OpenAI).
Three winners will share the credits
Following the presentations, the judges selected three winning teams, each of which will receive $120,000 in credits from Vercel's AI platform partners. The event also included top investors, the accelerator's AI partners, and members of the Vercel engineering team.
