Meet the 2026 Vercel AI Accelerator Cohort

The Vercel AI Accelerator is back, and this year we selected 39 early-stage teams from across the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America to build with us for six weeks.

The next generation of AI startups is building on our self-driving infrastructure, and the accelerator is how we work directly with the earliest-stage founders among them. This year’s cohort spans every industry, at varying points in their journey, but they share a clear point of view on what needs to exist right now and the urgency to ship it.

Teams in the program get access to Vercel infrastructure, $8M+ in partner credits (AWS, Anthropic, OpenAI, Cartesia, ElevenLabs, and more), weekly sessions with founders and technical leaders, and dedicated VC mentors.

Link to headingMeet the 2026 cohort

Alloy — Founder: Joe Harris

Alloy Robotics turns terabytes of robot data into instant debugging, analysis, and reporting.

Archival — Founders: Pablo Diaz-Granados, Jay Katyan, Griffin Ogura

Archival reveals how teams are actually using AI. With workflow-level visibility and analytics, leaders can improve AI adoption and ROI.

Ares Technology — Founder: Tony Hunter

Ares is a revenue command center, a single surface to find, engage, close, and grow revenue, powered by agents that work across your customer data.

Carbyn AI — Founders: Jungkeun Hong (CEO), Tim Phuan (CTO)

Carbyn AI is Claude Code for machinists, with AI glasses that capture tribal knowledge and coach operators in real time.

Cloudglue — Founders: Amy Xiao, Kevin Dela Rosa

Cloudglue is the context layer for video, enabling users, AI agents, and applications to understand and work across video at scale.

CodeYam — Founders: Nadia Eldeib, Jared Cosulich

CodeYam introduces simulations to create a powerful AI-native software development experience.

Coreviz — Founder: Wassim Gharbi

An AI-native media workspace that understands, organizes, and edits your organization's photos and videos with AI.

Grid58 — Founders: Mani HK, Sures Kumar TS

Grid58 is the operating system for making software, enabling you to understand what to build, research, design, and code.

Hacktron AI — Founders: Zayne Zhang, Mohan Pedhapati, Harsh Jaiswal

Hacktron is your AI teammate for security. As AI accelerates the volume of code being written, vulnerabilities scale with it. Hacktron integrates into your development lifecycle to find and remediate real, exploitable issues.

HiveBase — Founders: Nick Bae, Tim Tong

HiveBase syncs your Linear, Notion, Slack, and CRM into one living company brain, then runs your ops across product, eng, and GTM.

Hotfix — Founders: Sam Forrester, Evan Eissler, Jack Neil

Hotfix is an AI production operator that connects to your codebase and cloud infrastructure to fix issues as they happen.

Integrated Reasoning — Founder: David Cox

Integrated Reasoning is building ARROW, the world's first wafer-scale solver for mixed integer linear programming.

Judea — Founder: Maggie Chen

Judea is an autonomous agent that continuously optimizes your product on autopilot. Simply define your target metric, and Judea handles the rest.

Kinect — Founders: Kratik Agrawal, Varun Kandula

Kinect is building dynamic storefronts for human and agent customers, an intelligent AI brand layer that adapts to each visitor.

Kuvia — Founders: Martina Belluomini, Ana Gorodisch

Kuvia develops AI for digital pathology to detect cancer biomarkers and expand access to precision cancer care.

Lane — Founders: Jack Clark, Jorge Armenta

Lane is payments and commerce infrastructure for the agentic web, giving AI agents the ability to buy on your behalf and sellers a way to reach them.

Mighty — Founders: Johnny Hung, Munam Wasi

Mighty stops AI-powered fraud before it happens. The security gateway protects AI agents across text, images, and documents in real time.

Milq — Founders: Juan Djuwadi, Neel Makhecha

Milq is Lovable for iOS — a delightful Mac app for building Swift applications.

Niyam AI — Founders: Samarth Shyam, Agrim Singh

Niyam AI is building the control plane for hardware manufacturing.

Nura — Founder: Usman Ahmed

Nura is the AI copilot for real estate development, automating zoning, feasibility, and pro forma analysis.

OpenVet — Founder: Adam Sager

OpenVet is an AI hospital for every animal on earth, advancing veterinary medicine with the first outcome-based biological dataset across all species.

Orchestra Research — Founders: Zechen Zhang, Amber Jiachen Liu

Orchestra Research is building the Jarvis for Science and democratizing science for everyone.

Pai — Founders: Gigi Grimes, Everhett Grimes

Pai builds digital twins of your real customers so you can test products, ads, and messaging in minutes.

Partly — Founders: Shivani Bajaj, Shantanu Prakash

Partly is building the data intelligence layer for agent-assisted hardware commerce.

Penelope Health — Founders: Sohum Patel, Mattijs De Paepe

Penelope is the API and MCP layer for US medical payments — building the largest corpus of payer policies to reduce medical claim denials.

ProxieLabs — Founders: Alex Junod, Cristian Besliu

ProxieLabs replaces slow, expensive market research with AI-powered conjoint analysis, delivering validated consumer preference data in minutes.

Rex — Founders: Merlin Kafka, Lewis Blackwood

Rex is an AI platform for operational finance work. Rex unifies customer context across finance systems so agents can run AR processes end to end.

Roots — Founders: Lauren Self, David Golovin

Roots offers the easiest way to buy and sell homes. Buyers save $100s to $1000s monthly, while sellers net $1000s more at closing.

Sentia Labs — Founders: Akshay Murthy, Sarthak Gupta, Advait Kushe

Sentia is building the always-on UX insights engine for product teams.

Smithery — Founders: Henry Mao, Anirudh Kamath

Smithery is building the connectivity infrastructure to enable the agent economy.

Takeoff — Founder: Brad Bitler

Takeoff is an AI travel platform that helps consumers plan better trips and helps hotels and travel brands reach them at the moment of discovery.

Truli — Founders: Catherine Zhou, Michael Wu

Truli builds AI agents that help food, supplement, and beverage brands stay compliant.

Vakoi AI — Founders: Ao Fu, Gagan Devagiri

Vakoi AI delivers customized immersive ads in video games at scale.

Cuak — Founders: Jihyun Kim, Cashel Fitzgerald

Cuak is a computer-use agent that handles enterprise sales and application support, running 24/7 and grounded in your SOPs.

Link to headingWhat's next for the cohort

On March 18th, we're bringing the cohort together with the entire Vercel ecosystem for Builder Day at our new San Francisco headquarters. The day will include a fireside chat with Guillermo Rauch (Vercel CEO) and Stephen Haney (Paper CEO), as well as office hours with our accelerator partners.

From there, teams will have four weeks to refine and ship, leading up to Demo Day on April 16th in San Francisco. Each team will present what they've built to AI leaders, VCs, and builders, and judges will select three winners to receive over $100K in credits and prizes from Vercel and our partners, including an investment from Vercel Ventures for the first-place team.

Past accelerator teams like Stably AI, Cervo, and Bear AI have gone on to raise venture rounds, land enterprise customers, and form partnerships through the program. Follow along as this year's cohort builds over the next six weeks.