A six-week program offering over $6M in credits from Vercel, v0, AWS, and leading AI platforms
Building an AI business is no small feat. Delivering a great agentic product requires infrastructure that handles deployment, security, and scale automatically, but that's table stakes. Startups also need community support, mentorship, investor connections, platform credits, and visibility.
That's why we created the Vercel AI Accelerator. Last year, we hosted our second cohort of 40 early-stage teams from across the globe. They joined us for six weeks of learning, building, and shipping, hearing from speakers in leadership at AWS, Anthropic, Cursor, Braintrust, MongoDB, HubSpot, Vercel, and more. The program culminated with a demo day in San Francisco that drew hundreds from across the industry.
This year, the Accelerator is back with another cohort of 40 teams building the future of AI. Applications are open now until February 16th.
Link to headingProgram benefits
The AI Accelerator provides access to thousands of dollars in credits from Vercel, v0, AWS, and a variety of AI platforms. Participants also get to join an exclusive group of AI builders within the Vercel Community. Here are the full details:
Credits from Vercel, v0, AWS, and leading AI platforms, including Anthropic, Cursor, ElevenLabs, Hugging Face, Cartesia, Roboflow, Modal, Julius.ai, Sentry, Vanta, Auth0, Browserbase, WorkOS, Supabase, Autonoma, and Neon
Join an exclusive group of AI builders within the Vercel Community to share progress and exchange ideas during the program
Participate in weekly sessions with industry leaders connect you directly with AI startup founders, investors, and technical leaders through fireside chats and office hours
Access production-focused guides, templates, and videos designed to accelerate development cycles and help ship faster
Present your product to industry leaders and VCs at demo day, creating visibility and potential fundraising opportunities
Link to headingPlatform credits and prizes
Every company accepted into the Accelerator receives thousands of dollars in credits from partner platforms. Finalists earn over $100K each in additional credit prizes, providing the compute and infrastructure resources needed to build and scale AI applications without operational overhead.
$1M in Activate credits toward eligible AWS services.
$600k in credits toward their API.
$288k in credits toward their voice AI platform.
$11k in credits toward their AI code editor.
$170k in credits to use their text to speech and voice creation APIs.
$15k in credits to run inference of large models and run your AI apps with accelerated hardware.
$350k in credits to deploy your models, run fine-tuning jobs or host embedding pipelines.
$100k in credits to use their APIs.
$40k in credits toward creating and deploying computer vision models.
$600k in credits toward their enterprise ready integrations platform.
$20k in credits toward their AI Data Analyst.
$10k in credits toward their application monitoring software.
$50k in credits toward their automated security and compliance platform.
$864k in credits toward their authentication and identity management platform.
$24k in credits toward their headless browser infrastructure.
$40k in credits toward their hosted database and backend platform.
$20k in credits toward their AI powered UI testing.
$200k in credits toward their serverless Postgres platform.
$4k in credits toward their AI-native code review platform.
$20k in credits toward toward their end-to-end LLM evaluation platform.
$480k in credits toward Notion’s AI-powered workspace for docs, wikis, and collaboration
$216k in credits toward Vercel's AI-powered development platform that turns ideas into production-ready, full-stack web apps.
$1.2M in credits to build and deploy on the AI Cloud.
Link to headingSix weeks of focused development
The 40 selected teams will join us from March 2nd to April 16th for six weeks of building and networking.
The program includes:
Direct access to leading AI builders
Exclusive AI content
Community connections
Optional IRL meet ups
Welcome and mid-point goal check-ins
Mentorship from VC partners
The program ends with a demo day in San Francisco on April 16th:
The audience will include leaders and investors
Judges will select 3 winners to receive over $100k in resources
The first-place winner will receive an investment from Vercel Ventures
Our previous demo day featured product launches from 26 teams and attracted hundreds of industry professionals. Judges from AWS, Vercel, Cursor, Modal, OpenAI, and Roboflow selected the winners.
Since that event, several teams have raised venture funding rounds, secured enterprise customers, and established partnerships through connections made during the accelerator.
Link to headingInfrastructure for AI development
We continue investing across the AI stack, from SDKs to templates, supporting how developers build modern apps and agents. Recent AI releases include Workflow DevKit, Sandboxes, Skills.sh, and git support in v0.
These tools are designed to handle infrastructure automatically so teams can focus on building AI products. Companies like Sensay, Chatbase, and Leonardo.ai are built with Next.js and deployed on Vercel.
Link to headingFocus on what matters
AI agents can now operate autonomously on code, making decisions and taking actions without constant human oversight. This shift requires infrastructure that scales automatically and handles operational complexity behind the scenes. Vercel provides that foundation, giving startups the freedom to focus on building AI applications that solve real problems.
In our last cohort we backed early-stage teams like Stably AI, Cervo, Bear AI, and General Translation.
Apply to the Vercel AI Accelerator and join a cohort of developers building AI applications that operate independently and scale automatically. Applications close February 16th.
Applicants must be Vercel customers at or above the age of majority in your jurisdiction. Applicants must be able to commit to the full 6 weeks of the program. Applicants must not be located in, or otherwise subject to restrictions imposed by, U.S. sanctions laws.We are looking for pre-seed ideas. Applications will be judged based on quality of submission, founder background, and overall potential for impact and scalability.