Vercel’s Series A Came Three and a Half Years After Next.js Launched

Next.js builds websites, and Vercel hosts them

A developer building a website with React, the JavaScript library for interfaces that Facebook released, still has to decide how pages are put together, where they are rendered and how the site is split into addresses. Next.js makes those decisions for them. Each file in a folder becomes a page, and a page can be rendered on the server, so the browser receives finished HTML. A finished site still has to run somewhere, and Vercel sells that hosting. Next.js is free and MIT-licensed, so anyone can run it on any server. Vercel’s business is running it, and other frameworks, for customers.

ZEIT launched hosting with a paid plan on the page

Guillermo Rauch had been CTO and cofounder of LearnBoost and Cloudup, which Automattic acquired in 2013. He wrote: “In November 2015 I started a new company called ZEIT, with my friends and brilliant engineers Tony Kovanen and Naoyuki Kanezawa.”

ZEIT’s first product, now, launched on 6 April 2016. One command put a project on the web. The page that day listed a free plan, a Premium plan at “$14.99 / mo” and an Enterprise plan. We found no source that says when the first customer paid.

By the end of 2016, Rauch counted “2 billion+ requests served” and wrote that users had “deployed over 40,000 times”. ZEIT had grown “the team to 8”.

Next.js launched as the framework behind ZEIT’s own site

The Next.js repository was created on 5 October 2016, and Rauch made the first commit, titled “initial spec”. Twenty days later, ZEIT announced “a small framework for server-rendered universal JavaScript webapps”, “which powers this very site!” The post’s last section showed how to deploy a Next.js app with now. Neither the post nor anything else from 2016 that we found says the framework was meant to bring customers to the hosting.

The launch post credited Kanezawa, Kovanen and Rauch. At the commit titled “Release 1.0.0”, Kanezawa had made 80 commits, Dan Zajdband 25 and Rauch 22; Kovanen’s first two came later that day. The package file declared the MIT license from the start, and an outside contributor added the license file four days later, in pull request #93.

Launch day is still the biggest on GitHub

The Hacker News post on 25 October drew 618 points and 162 comments. GitHub dates 1,713 surviving stars (stars not since removed) to that day and 1,211 to the next. Ten years and 143,471 stars later, no later day has passed either count. Next.js 2.0, released on 27 March 2017, is third, with 641.

GitHub star history for vercel/next.js, 21 to 30 October 2016, collected on 11 November 2026. Removed stars are not counted.

These counts are floors. Archived copies of the repository page show more stars than survive for the same date. On 4 January 2017, the page showed 7,818 stars, and 6,775 of them still exist, so about 13% of the early stars are gone. October 2016 brought 4,076 surviving stars, all in the seven days from launch, and it is still the repository’s best month. The next best are January 2021, with 2,504, and June 2021, with 2,102.

After launch, Next.js had one full-time maintainer at a time

Arunoda Susiripala joined ZEIT in early 2017 and later wrote: “I maintained Next.js for about a year until Tim took it over.” Tim Neutkens, who had 107 pull requests merged before he joined, came at the end of 2017. He recalled: “I was the only person working on Next full-time at the time. And I basically ended up maintaining it by myself for over a year”.

The company stayed small. ZEIT’s about page listed 7 people in May 2017 and 30 in March 2020, a month before the Series A.

The Series A came three and a half years after launch

ZEIT raised money before 2020, but we found no statement of how much. Rauch said in an interview recorded in 2021: “we did raise some seed money, but we spent a lot of time on R&D”. Reid Christian of CRV wrote that the firm “initially invested in Guillermo’s last venture, a startup he built and sold to Wordpress”, and “quickly got back in business with Guillermo” when he started the new company. Christian gave no date or amount, and no other source we found does either.

On 21 April 2020, ZEIT renamed itself Vercel and announced a $21 million Series A: “Accel and CRV are our lead investors, alongside Naval Ravikant, Nat Friedman, Jordan Walke, and others.” Accel’s own post says it led the round. Vercel said “Next.js powers over 35,000 sites”. Dan Levine of Accel wrote: “There are only so many opportunities to back a dominant platform framework. Vercel is built on the success of its open source framework Next.js, used by more than 300,000 developers today.”

The repository had 43,054 surviving stars dated before the announcement. Two days later, its page showed 47,227, against 43,211 surviving stars dated by then. The day of the round brought 59 stars, compared with an average of 33 a day over the four weeks before, the largest rise over the prior four weeks’ average on any funding day and far below the days after releases.

Investors named Next.js in some statements and not others

Leads and valuations are in Vercel’s words. Stars before counts surviving stars dated before each announcement, so each figure is lower than the count shown at the time. The Series F came with a tender offer of about $300 million.

The press releases quote a lead investor at each round from the Series B, and most of those quotes do not mention Next.js. At the Series B, Tyson Clark of GV spoke of “Vercel’s collaborative approach to interactive web applications”. At the Series C, Geoff Lewis of Bedrock said “the majority of value-add in web and cloud application development” was “being delivered at the front end”.

The Series D is the exception. Glenn Solomon of GGV, who also backed HashiCorp, the subject of the eighth Repo to Round, said in the release: “Vercel created and continues to build Next.js into the dominant React framework.” He told TechCrunch: “We could see what was happening with the Next.js community, with the Vercel business model and how it really snaps together with the Next.js community.” He added that the company was “blowing those expectations away from a financial plan standpoint”. A Form D filed that December reports $149,998,984 sold to 29 investors.

Accel’s press-release quotes at the Series E and F are about the frontend, AI and v0, Vercel’s AI app builder. Accel’s own blog posts name Next.js at both the Series A and the Series F. Its Series F post lists it third, after v0 and Vercel’s AI cloud: “their open-source framework Next.js powers global brands like AT&T, Nike, and Walmart”. None of these investor statements cites GitHub stars, commits or repository activity.

Vercel says annualized revenue passed $100 million by May 2024 and $500 million by July 2026

Vercel is private and has given revenue as annualized figures. An investor, Notable Capital, wrote in 2025 that “at $2M ARR, Vercel sat at 0% gross margins”, and that its margins passed 70% after it passed $8 million. At the Series E in May 2024, the release said “Vercel recently surpassed $100M in annualized revenue.” The Information reported about $200 million in mid-2025. The company told Forbes that its “run-rate GAAP revenue hit $340 million” at the end of February 2026, “up 86% year over year”. On 6 August 2026, it said it had “crossed $500 million in annualized run-rate revenue in early July”.

People at Vercel now open more than nine in ten merged pull requests

Changes to an open-source project usually arrive as pull requests, proposed edits that the maintainers review and merge. Next.js has had 28,593 pull requests merged from 3,951 people, not counting bots, and 2,957 of those people had exactly one merged. The 10 most active authors wrote 42.6% of them and the 50 most active wrote 73.3%. The top four are JJ Kasper (2,595), Tim Neutkens (1,936), Tobias Koppers (1,509) and Jiachi Liu (1,354).

We dated when each of the 50 most active authors worked at Vercel, from their own posts, company posts, archived team pages, profile dates and the repository itself. For these 50, a pull request counts as Vercel’s when its author was at Vercel on the day they opened it; other authors count if they have a public link to Vercel. On that count, people at Vercel opened about half of the pull requests merged in 2020, three quarters of those merged in 2023, and more than nine in ten since the start of 2025.

Pull requests are counted in the year they were merged, excluding bots. Stars are surviving stars dated to each year. 2026 runs to collection on 11 November. The range in the first row turns on JJ Kasper’s start date, which we could not confirm: the higher figure counts him from the month his online profiles give, and the lower from the first Next.js release post that lists him as an author.

Stars and merged work moved apart. Yearly stars peaked in 2021 and fell each year through 2025, while merged pull requests more than doubled from 2021 to 2024.

Vercel also hired people who wrote the tools Next.js is built on. Tobias Koppers, who created webpack, the tool Next.js used to bundle code, joined in April 2021. Donny, known as kdy1, who created the SWC compiler, joined in July 2021. From the React core team, Sebastian Markbåge joined in January 2022 and Andrew Clark in February 2023. Dan Abramov joined the Next.js team part-time on 25 June 2026, and Pete Hunt joined to lead Next.js on 16 July. Mark Erikson, who maintains Redux, wrote that “‘Vercel took over React’ is wrong, and it’s more like ‘part of React core migrated to Vercel and convinced Vercel to align with React’s vision’”.

Far fewer outside pull requests are merged

Outside authors here are people with no public link to Vercel, no pull request since 2022 from a branch inside the Next.js repository, which needs write access, and no team label on their pull requests. In 2026 they opened more pull requests than in any year measured and had the fewest merged.

Pull requests by outside authors, counted in the year they were opened, as of 11 November 2026. The last column covers pull requests opened from 1 January to 13 August of each year, so every year is compared at the same age.

Of the 1,950 they opened in 2026, 212 have been merged and 1,118 are still open, so 2026’s rate can still rise. Compared at the same age, the fall holds: 59% merged within 90 days in 2024, 29% in 2025 and 12% in 2026.

Occasional contributors show the same fall. Outside authors with fewer than five pull requests merged in a year had 713 merged in 2024, 318 in 2025 and 206 in 2026. About half of the drop is documentation. Their documentation-only pull requests went from 348 to 149 to 68, examples-only from 125 to 31 to 14, and everything else from 240 to 138 to 124. On 12 March 2025, Next.js removed the examples section from its contribution guide, and examples account for about 94 of the 395 fewer merges from 2024 to 2025.

We found no stated cause for the rest of the fall. In August 2026, the contribution guide was changed to say “Trivial PRs such as typo fixes, formatting, or code style changes are likely to be closed”, with documentation exempted, and in September a workflow titled “Next Maintainer auto-close” was added. Both came after most of the fall. The data shows fewer outside pull requests merged; it does not show why.

The argument was over hosting, not the license

Next.js can run on an ordinary server anywhere. Running it the way Vercel does, split into serverless functions behind a cache, was harder for other hosts. In December 2022, SST started OpenNext to do that on Amazon Web Services. Its 1.0 post said: “Next.js does not support self-hosting your app using serverless”, and that earlier attempts had found it hard “as it requires reverse engineering how Vercel deploys Next.js internally”.

In late October 2023, Kent C. Dodds, who teaches web development, wrote: “OpenNext exists because Next.js is difficult to deploy anywhere but Vercel. I’m not making moral judgements here.” Lee Robinson of Vercel replied on 28 October: “all Next.js features work self-hosted”. On adapters, code that lets a host plug into the build, he wrote: “We aren’t doing adapters, although I love this for other frameworks.”

On 23 March 2025, Jimmy Lai of Vercel wrote that Vercel was “actively working with the folks from OpenNext and other partners to ship an official build adapter API for Next.js”. Two days later, a Netlify engineer, Eduardo Bouças, wrote that “any hosting providers other than Vercel must build on top of undocumented APIs that can introduce unannounced breaking changes in minor or patch releases”. Netlify’s post the next day added that “only four community RFCs have been adopted in eight years”. On 2 April, Robinson posted the adapters proposal: “we are planning to add deployment adapters. Vercel will use the same adapter API as every other partner.”

In November 2025, Vercel said that, based on its telemetry, “approximately 70% of Next.js applications run outside of Vercel”, and that “Every Next.js 16 application deployed on Vercel uses the same adapter API available to other platforms.” Next.js 16.2, on 18 March 2026, said: “Adapters are now stable.” On 26 March, Netlify wrote: “Vercel’s adapter has been published and already powers builds for some projects on their platform. Until now, Next.js builds on Vercel had been powered by undocumented code paths in Next.js and closed source on Vercel. These are huge milestones”. It added: “We are not claiming that these choices were made intentionally or with ill intent.”

Control of the project stayed where it was. Next.js’s governance page says the “Next.js team at Vercel manages the direction of Next.js”, and the charter of the Ecosystem Working Group, started in March 2026, says “The Next.js team retains final decision-making authority over the framework”. The license terms never changed. The license file’s history since 2016 is changes to the copyright holder’s name, among them ZEIT and Vercel, year updates and file moves.

Cloudflare rewrote Next.js instead of forking it

A fork is a copy of a project’s code that another group develops separately. The Blitz.js project kept one, blitz-js/next.js, last updated on 1 September 2021 and now archived, with 28 stars. We found no maintained fork.

On 24 February 2026, Cloudflare announced vinext: “one engineer and an AI model rebuilt the most popular front-end framework from scratch”. The post called it “experimental” and said some of its tests were “ported directly from the Next.js test suite”. Its README answers the question “Is this a fork of Next.js?” with “No. vinext is an alternative implementation of the Next.js API surface built on Vite.”

The rewrite drew more stars than OpenNext’s main repository, which has 5,048 in total. vinext has 9,350 stars, all from 2026, more than the 8,905 Next.js has gained this year, and 1,868 of them are dated 25 February.

Vercel answered with security findings. On 26 February, Rauch wrote that Vercel had “identified, responsibly disclosed, and confirmed 2 critical, 2 high, 2 medium, 1 low security vulnerabilities in Cloudflare’s vibe-coded framework Vinext.” Cloudflare merged a run of security fixes into vinext the same day. On 15 March, Rauch put the count at 10. The Pragmatic Engineer wrote that “vinext is not production-ready” and that Vercel raising the vulnerabilities was “more than fair game”.

Cloudflare released vinext 1.0 on 28 September 2026, calling it “a framework that our customers trust and run in production” and the February version “the one-off slopfork”. We found no response from Vercel.

What a small team can take from Vercel

These are our inferences from the record above, not claims by Vercel or its investors.

The framework and the hosting arrived together. ZEIT sold hosting first, released Next.js as the framework behind its own site, and closed the launch post’s last section with a deploy command for its own product. Nothing from 2016 that we found says Next.js was meant to sell hosting, but the path from one to the other was a single step.

The Series A came long after the GitHub peak. Launch day is still the repository’s best day, and the first announced round came three and a half years later, when ZEIT’s about page listed 30 people. Accel’s post at the Series A named Next.js and its users. No funding day moved stars the way a release did.

A permissive license and control of the project went together. Vercel kept Next.js under MIT, its staff open more than nine in ten merged pull requests, and its governance keeps final decisions with the Next.js team at Vercel. Competitors argued about how to host it, not about the license, and the answer, an adapter API, was built in the Next.js repository. HashiCorp, in the eighth Repo to Round, changed its license and was forked by companies with their own engineers. Vercel kept its license, and the competing effort with the most stars was a rewrite.

Stars are a poor count of who contributes. Next.js’s yearly stars have fallen since 2021, while its merged pull requests rose, and the outside share of them fell. A team that wants to know whether outsiders still contribute can count their merged pull requests directly.

Sources and method

This article covers 2013–2026. Star figures come from GitHub’s repository star history API for vercel/next.js, cloudflare/vinext and opennextjs/opennextjs-aws, collected on 11 November 2026. It returns stars still present (“surviving stars”), not historical displayed totals: the 528 weeks for Next.js sum to its 143,471 stars at collection. We measured removed stars at three dates by comparing archived copies of the repository page with the history: 7,818 shown against 6,775 surviving on 4 January 2017, 47,227 against 43,211 on 23 April 2020, and 77,100 against 71,918 on 25 November 2021. Daily, monthly and yearly groupings use the returned week timestamps and day offsets; GitHub does not guarantee that its day boundaries align with UTC.

Pull request figures cover all 42,171 pull requests in vercel/next.js, retrieved through GitHub’s GraphQL API in November 2026. Of the 29,672 merged, we excluded 1,079 opened by GitHub app accounts, by three automation accounts (vercel-release-bot, nextjs-bot and greenkeeperio-bot) and by deleted accounts, which leaves 28,593. Commits pushed without a pull request are not counted.

For the 50 authors with the most merged pull requests, we took a start and an end date at Vercel from the best evidence we found, in this order: the person’s own dated statement, a company or Next.js post that names them, an archived team page, a profile date, and the repository itself. A year with no month counts from 1 January, “early 2017” from 1 January 2017 and “end of 2017” from 1 December 2017. Of the 20,055 pull requests counted as Vercel’s this way, 50% rest on the author’s own statement, 5% on a company post, 3% on an archived team page, 33% on a profile date seen in a search result or on a third-party site, and 9% on repository evidence alone. Of the 50 authors’ 20,969 merged pull requests, 326 were opened before the author joined and 13 after the author left, and 575 are by seven authors with no sign of Vercel employment, three of whom worked at Google. Authors outside the top 50 count as Vercel’s if they are public members of the vercel organization on GitHub, their profile names Vercel or ZEIT, or a commit email is at vercel.com or zeit.co, and that link counts for every year. Adding authors outside the top 50 who opened pull requests from branches inside the repository, which needs write access but does not prove employment, gives 91.5% for 2025 and 94.6% for 2026. Shares for 2016–2018 are not shown, because each rests on the start dates of one or two people. The share for the table’s first year also turns on one person’s start date, so it is shown as a range.

Outside authors are those with no public link, no pull request from a branch inside vercel/next.js since 2022 and no team label on their pull requests. “Documentation only” means every file changed is under docs/ or errors/.

Hacker News points and comments come from the Algolia Hacker News API in November 2026. Funding dates are announcement dates. Vercel is private, so revenue figures are as stated by the company or reported by the press, and marked as such above. Some posts on X were read through copies.