San Francisco-based startup Vercel announced the closure of a $21 million Series A funding round on Tuesday. Vercel, formerly known as Zeit, was founded in 2015 by the creators of the Next.js web framework.
Vercel’s cloud platform aims to improve the development experience for front-end teams on Jamstack sites. Vercel organizes JavaScript workflows with a serverless edge deployment model in order to optimize site performance and provide an improved developer experience.
According to the company, by leveraging Jamstack architecture, Vercel can split the front-end of a site from the back-end so that site development can happen much faster.
“Front end developers want to create amazing experiences for users, not wrestle with complexities of configuring servers, clusters, compilers, and build systems,” Guillermo Rauch, co-founder of Vercel, said in a statement. “We saw an opportunity to re-think the entire workflow for the world’s 11 million Javascript developers, to give them a superior developer experience, and to give their users the best site performance on the web.”
Vercel helps power the front-end experience for high-traffic websites including Hulu, GitHub, Hilton, Ticketmaster, Twitch and Uber, among others. All told, its Next.js framework powers 35,000 websites.
“We're going to be laser-focused on building the best experience for developers, in small teams and now in enterprises as well. Our product roadmap will continue to prioritize creating the best tools and the most efficient workflows to support the ‘develop, preview, ship’ model,” Rauch wrote in an email to Built In.
The round was led by existing investors Accel and CRV, while React creator Jordan Walke and GitHub CEO Nat Friedman also participated. The company intends to use the new funds to streamline technology that makes it easier for developers to collaborate, as well as expand benefits for its remote employees.
