4 min read
Today, we have some very special news regarding the evolution of our company.
ZEIT is now Vercel. This new identity aligns with our new focus — to provide the ultimate workflow for developing, previewing, and shipping Jamstack sites.
Towards that goal, we are thrilled to also announce that we secured $21M in Series A funding. Accel and CRV are our lead investors, alongside Naval Ravikant, Nat Friedman, Jordan Walke, and others.
Our Origins
In 2016, we started with a simple goal: empowering solo developers to effortlessly deploy their apps.
There is an overwhelming layer of technology and terminology in web development: domain setup with DNS and SSL, networking with TCP and HTTP, caching with CDN and Edge Networks... it's a huge list. It creates much complexity.
Our first product, now, focused on simplifying deployments:
Developers loved now. Tired of boilerplate, they appreciated the ability to trivially deploy, share, and scale their apps. The positive response was motivating — we were stoked!
Since then, we have invested all our energy into building products that simplify developer experience. Our open-source React framework Next.js is the most notable of them. At organizations big and small, it has become the framework to build React apps due to its simple learning curve, versatility, and performance.
Today, Next.js powers over 35,000 sites at companies like Uber, Nike, and Starbucks.
In these 4 years, ZEIT has gone from being a simple idea to a thriving community. 300,000+ frontend engineers and designers are using our technology to bring their ideas to life — whether company websites, SaaS products, or personal blogs.
Our Renewed Focus: Develop. Preview. Ship
From observing our community, we know that frontend engineers are more productive than ever. Frameworks like Next.js eliminate boilerplate, and serverless APIs give them full-stack powers.
Projects that once took months to develop, are getting completed by lean teams of frontend engineers and designers in days. These teams want to iterate rapidly, and collaboratively. They want to develop, preview, and ship at the speed of thought. They don't want to leave their browsers, and other tools they're already working with. That's where we come in.
We enable teams to develop, preview, and ship their apps faster, and with confidence.
For teams, Vercel closes the gap between development, feedback and release phase. Anyone can set up Vercel in a couple of clicks — no DevOps knowledge necessary.
We use Vercel to build Vercel. We are constantly examining every interaction in own team workflow, and are obsessed about removing every little source of friction.
We have already introduced multiple updates focused on teams. Most recently:
We look forward to adding even more to our team features in the weeks to come.
Our New Brand: Vercel
As we expand our outlook, we felt this new focus merited a new identity.
As of today, we are re-establishing our brand identity as Vercel.
Vercel strongly connects to the words versatile, accelerate, and excel. It aligns with the benefits our platform offers: faster and better product collaboration, across every team in your organization.
We are introducing a new logotype for the brand, which we will use across our product and marketing. We decided to retain our signature triangle logo, although we have simplified it.
Our Series A Funding
Our mission is to provide 11M JavaScript developers the workflow to work with Jamstack sites.
To accelerate us in our mission, we have raised $21M in Series A funding. Our investors have led early design at Facebook and Dropbox, created frameworks like React, and are running companies like GitHub, Sentry, and Auth0. We are thrilled to count them as partners in our mission.
This new funding ensures an ever improving Vercel product experience and allows us to continue investing in our open-source projects like Next.js.
The Path Ahead for Vercel
Vercel is the easiest way to deploy any Jamstack site in 2020.
If you're new to our community, welcome! We encourage you to deploy with us — it takes 15 seconds to get started with zero-config deployments, and our unlimited usage Hobby plan is free.
If you're an existing customer — you'll find that none of your existing workflows, pricing plans, or projects have changed. We're more focused than ever on helping you succeed.
Over the next few weeks, we will begin to update our branding across all of our products, communication channels, and open-source projects. We have compiled a comprehensive FAQ that offers details about our full migration plan.
Conclusion
ZEIT is rebranding to Vercel.
It's the same passionate team, with the same attention to detail.
With a new focus on the develop, preview, ship workflow and a $21M Series A, we're excited to take developer productivity to the next level. In his blog, our CEO Guillermo Rauch has written about the industry trends surrounding Jamstack, and the thought process behind our new focus.
Our Rebrand Field Book details our full product migration plan, including a list of changes with relevant dates. If you have any unanswered questions, please reach out and we'll gladly help.
As always, we are incredibly grateful for your never-ending support. There are many more milestones to come and we invite you to join us on this journey.