Guillermo Rauch

Founder of Vercel

Guillermo Rauch is the founder and chief executive of Vercel, a San Francisco cloud application company. He also created the real-time communication library Socket.IO and the Next.js web framework, which Vercel maintains as open source.^[1][2]

Vercel describes itself as agentic infrastructure for every app and agent, a platform where humans and agents build software together. Its site lists investors including Accel, GV and Tiger Global and individual backers such as Nat Friedman and React creator Jordan Walke, but does not publish usage or revenue figures. Wikipedia reports about 550 employees in 2025.^[1][4]

From Lanus to San Francisco

EY, which named Rauch a finalist for Argentina in its 2025 World Entrepreneur Of The Year program, says he began programming at age 10 in Lanus, Argentina, and became known in the JavaScript community as a teenager through open-source contributions. At 19 he moved to San Francisco.^[3]

EY says he co-founded the learning platform LearnBoost and then Cloudup, where he was chief technology officer until Automattic acquired the company. Socket.IO, which Wikipedia credits to him as original author, is among his best-known open-source work; Wikipedia lists release 4.8.3 of the library as of March 2026.^[3][5]

From ZEIT to Vercel

Rauch founded the company in 2015 as ZEIT and rebranded it Vercel in April 2020. Next.js was first released as an open-source project on October 25, 2016. Wikipedia names Rauch with Tim Neutkens, Naoyuki Kanezawa, Arunoda Susiripala, Tony Kovanen and Dan Zajdband as original authors.^[1][6]

The framework's release history tracks Vercel's strategy. Version 8 in February 2019 was the first to offer serverless deployment, version 12 in October 2021 added a Rust compiler and Edge Functions, version 13 in October 2022 introduced the App Router built on React Server Components and streaming, version 15 in October 2024 added the Turbopack bundler, and version 16 arrived in October 2025. Wikipedia lists Walmart, Apple, Nike, Netflix, TikTok, Uber, Lyft, Starbucks and Spotify among large sites using it as of October 2024.^[6]

Products, acquisitions and funding

Vercel released the AI application builder v0 and the AI SDK in 2023; v0 won a 2025 Webby Award for developer tools. In 2025 it introduced Fluid, an infrastructure model that lets an instance handle multiple requests concurrently while keeping serverless elasticity.^[1]

Funding under Rauch includes a $102 million Series C in June 2021, $250 million at a $3.25 billion valuation in May 2024, and a $300 million Series F at a $9.3 billion valuation in September 2025, co-led by Accel and GIC. Acquisitions listed on Wikipedia are Turborepo in December 2021, Splitbee in October 2022, Tremor in January 2025, NuxtLabs in July 2025, and Better Auth and Stakpak in July 2026.^[1]

2026 developments and controversies

In March 2026 HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto joined Vercel's board. On April 19, 2026 Vercel disclosed that unauthorized actors had accessed some internal systems; Wikipedia reports that the company traced it to a compromised third-party AI tool and that accessed variables were ones not marked as sensitive.^[1]

In September 2025 Rauch posted a photo with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from a private tech meeting in New York. Wikipedia says the post drew widespread criticism and a boycott, with many developers deleting accounts and moving to alternatives.^[1][2]

Why he matters

Rauch is one of the few founders to have created widely used open-source infrastructure and then built a company around it. Next.js made Vercel the default home for many React applications, and v0 and the AI SDK are his attempt to carry that position into software that is increasingly written by agents.^[1][3][6]

On The Executive List

Guillermo Rauch is ranked No. 54 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Technology Officers discipline. The list row shows him as CEO / CTO; public sources describe him as Vercel's founder and CEO. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.