We are incredibly excited to share that existing GGV Capital portfolio company Vercel has raised a $150M Series D financing led by GGV. Our enthusiasm for Vercel is well earned. Not only has the open source frontend React and Javascript based framework created by Vercel, Next.js, rapidly become an industry standard, but Vercel’s ARR has grown exceptionally rapidly as well. GGV actively seeks to invest behind founders who have the ambition to empower developers to fuel the software boom that is gaining speed globally. Vercel hits the bullseye – an amazing founder, an enormous market and a developer-first approach that is enabling rapid product led growth.
Founder & Team. Vercel Founder & CEO, Guillermo Rauch, hails from Argentina and operated as a freelance developer from his teenage years. An active author of open source projects for many years, he conceived of and built Next.js from the beginning for frontend developers, focusing on allowing them to build faster, more responsive and highly customizable web sites and applications. Guillermo has an intuitive understanding of what developers need and has built Next.js to combine the best of both static and dynamic approaches. Developers have flocked to Next.js; today Next.js has over 77,000 Github stars and NPM downloads of 8 million over the past 12 months. Guillermo’s vision has extended to Vercel, which allows frontend developers to take full advantage of Next.js when developing, previewing and deploying their applications. Guillermo is rapidly building a team to help scale Vercel, and we’re excited to see where Guillermo and team continue to take both Next.js and Vercel over the coming years.
A Monster Market. At GGV we believe that every company is becoming a software company. This is happening across industries and across geographies. As more and more companies adopt a digital-first approach to interacting with customers, employees, partners and others in their ecosystem, the need to deliver a fast, performant, customized and reliable user experience is ratcheting up at breathtaking speed. The traffic to web sites and applications on the Vercel network and the number of Vercel powered sites in the Alexa 1,000 and 10,000 are all growing rapidly month to month. Given the massive increase in web-based sites and applications we’re seeing globally, Vercel will continue to gain share and grow fast for many, many years. NPS is also insanely high across all tiers of usage of Vercel, suggesting that developers love Vercel and are telling their friends.
Developer First Approach & PLG. The exceedingly high NPS the company enjoys (and works hard to maintain) helps drive continued adoption and further standardization of both Next.js and Vercel. As a result, the top one percentile ARR growth Vercel is experiencing is being driven by product led, bottoms up adoption. As we’ve seen at GGV with other amazing companies such as Square, Slack, Zendesk and Hashicorp, when a true product led growth flywheel gets spinning, the results can be non linear for extended periods of time!
As you can see, here at GGV Capital, we’re very excited to have increased our commitment to Vercel and look forward to working with Guillermo and team for many fruitful years to come.