Vercel adds $40M to speed frontend development

Vercel announced today that it has raised $40M in Series B funding to support its mission of helping teams build the next generation of web applications. The round was led by GV, with participation from new investors Greenoaks Capital, Bedrock Capital, and Geodesic Capital, alongside existing backers Accel and CRV. The company has now raised $61M total. The funds will go toward research and development, platform innovation, and expanding Vercel's global team to improve frontend developers' ability to build richer web experiences.

The company points to lessons learned from customers over the past year as evidence of how its platform and Next.js enable collaboration, component reuse, and architectural flexibility. Among the stories Vercel highlights:

  • Airbnb uses Vercel Preview URLs as the primary unit of collaboration between its design, engineering, product, and marketing teams. The company says this has shortened the feedback loop from weeks to minutes, letting teams prototype, mark up, and iterate on new features and pages without waiting for flagged features to ship.
  • TripAdvisor treats Vercel as a shared component knowledge base, allowing its numerous subsidiaries to reuse and share code across teams. This approach reportedly shortens the path from initial idea to MVP to a full global rollout.
  • HashiCorp pushed back on the limitations of purely static architectures. An early adopter of static sites, HashiCorp found that a strict Jamstack approach constrained its flexibility. The company influenced Vercel to support hybrid applications as a first-class architecture for Next.js development, allowing teams to mix rendering modes like CSR, SSR, and SSG based on what serves the end-user best.

These examples, Vercel says, demonstrate how its tools help organizations apply modern development practices at scale. The company's stated goal for 2021 is to invest in helping every team, from independent developers to Fortune 10 enterprises, build for the next era of the web.