This year, innovation has been top of mind for those in the mobile and web application development space as companies continue to search for new tools to cope with challenges brought on by a new era of remote work.
San Francisco-based startup Vercel is one of a few leading the way in the realm of such innovation. The front-end application building platform enables users to develop, preview and ship Jamstack sites.
The company announced Wednesday that it raised $40 million in a Series B round led by GV to round out a year of substantial financial growth.
The latest round marks the second raise for the company this year. Formerly known as Zeit, it closed on a $21 million Series A back in April. At the time, the company said it would use the funds to streamline its technology, as well as expand benefits for its remote employees.
The company will use the latest round of fresh funding to accelerate research and development and scale its team globally, and is now hiring for several open positions across teams.
“Since our inception, Vercel has been focused on creating the most powerful way to develop, preview and ship interactive web applications without having to depend on monolithic backend systems,” CEO Guillermo Rauch said in a statement. “Vercel is now the preferred frontend development platform, capable of providing dynamic web application experiences for growing legions of Javascript developers.”
By leveraging Jamstack architecture, Vercel can split the front-end of a website from the back-end so that site development can happen much faster, according to the company.
The platform’s hybrid framework, Next.js, was created with the intent to satisfy the needs of both static and dynamic websites and applications.
With this framework, the platform provides developers with the capability to view the front-end of web applications and websites within a repository before they’re deployed. The additional capital will enable the company to extend that same capability to end users as well.
“Hybrid applications give users all the capabilities and benefits of a static generator, while providing the flexibility of server-side rendering or streaming server-side rendering for additional personalization within the same application,” Vercel said in a statement.
Vercel’s platform is used to power the front-end experience for thousands of high-traffic websites including Hulu, Hilton, Ticketmaster, Github, Twitch and Uber, among others.
Personal accounts on the platform are free and enterprise teams are charged $20 per member.
Vercel, formerly known as Zeit, has raised $61 million in financing to date, according to Crunchbase. Greenoaks Capital, Bedrock Capital and Geodesic Capital participated in the round, among others.
