weekly startup spotlight

welcome to introspection ft. harsehaj! ⭐️ i’m harsehaj, a 19 y/o always up to something in social good x tech.

this publication is a place for me to reflect on productivity, health and tech, and drop unique opportunities in the space right to your inbox daily. if you’re new here, sign up to tune in!💌

scroll to the end for my daily roundup on unique opportunities!

onto today’s topic: vercel 🔗 

developing a website or webapp doesn’t stop at writing code. the next step for developers is to deploy their projects.

vercel, which maintains the next.js web development framework, helps users build web applications in the cloud and the b2b/b2c startup took off in 2020, later raising a $102 million series c funding round. as of may 2024, the company is valued at $3.25 billion. 📈 

essentially, vercel is a platform that helps developers create and host websites or web apps easily. it takes the code, makes it ready for the internet (builds it), and puts it online quickly, thus eliminating annoying parts involving servers, scaling, and more.

let’s talk numbers! 🤓

vercel operates within the backend-as-a-service (baaa) market, which was valued at ~$1.6 billion in 2023. as of 2024, vercel holds an estimated market share of 95.97% (source). in terms of financial growth. vercel’s revenue increased from $25.5 million in 2021 to $100 million in 2024, reflecting a cagr of approximately 57.8% (source).

as of december 2024, vercel is utilized by 0.6% of all websites, and by 1.0% of the top 1 million websites, which is more significant than it sounds (source). additionally, more than 1 million developers utilize vercel’s open-source framework, next.js, on a monthly basis (source).

questions i’d be interested to ask:

• how does vercel differentiate itself from netlify?

• how do you plan to expand and improve global adoption?

• what percentage of your revenue comes from enterprise customers versus smaller developers or startups?

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