Blog

On April 16th, 39 teams took the stage to pitch investors at Demo Day. During the prior six weeks, founders worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the Vercel team, our partners, and industry leaders to shape their ideas into the next generation of AI applications. Six weeks with the 2026 cohort Teams from around the world joined the 2026 cohort, building agents, developer tools, consumer apps, and vertical AI for finance, security, healthcare, and robotics. Each week, the cohort joined two sessions: a hands-on technical workshop and a fireside chat with an external speaker. The workshops covered the technical side of building AI products, from agents and models to deployment and scale. The fireside chats brought in industry leaders, Vercel experts, and investors. Speakers included Peter Steinberger (OpenAI/OpenClaw) and the Windsurf team, with topics ranging from the state of AI to pricing, legal, sales, marketing, and fundraising. Builder day Halfway through the program, the cohort came together with the broader Vercel startup ecosystem for Builder Day at Vercel's office. The day combined technical workshops, hands-on office hours with engineers from accelerator partners like AWS and Anthropic, open time to build and connect, and a special fireside chat between Malte Ubl (Vercel CTO) and Stephen Haney (Paper CEO). $8M in infrastructure and credits Beyond the programming, every team got over $200K to build with on Vercel and across the AI stack: Vercel AI stack: AI Gateway, Sandbox, Workflows, Fluid Compute, v0, and more Partners: AWS, Anthropic, OpenAI, Browserbase, ElevenLabs, Auth0, WorkOS, Notion, Modal, Neon, Supabase, and more Demo Day After six weeks of building, the cohort showed their work at Demo Day. Auth0 hosted the event at their offices, and each team had a few minutes to present to a room of VCs, AI leaders, and partners, with a panel of judges from across the AI ecosystem selecting the winners. Winners On Demo Day, judges scored teams on problem validity, technology fit, product quality, and each team's final pitch. Three teams took home $100K+ in credits and prizes, and the first-place team also received an investment from Vercel Ventures. 1st: Rex Rex is building AI for the enterprise finance back office, unifying customer context across systems so agents can run accounts receivable end to end. In addition to credits, Rex received an investment from Vercel Ventures. 2nd: Hacktron AI Hacktron AI is an AI teammate for security. As AI writes more of the code shipping into production, vulnerabilities scale with it. Hacktron integrates into the development lifecycle to find and remediate real, exploitable issues. 3rd: Roots Roots is rebuilding how people buy and sell homes. Buyers save hundreds to thousands of dollars a month, and sellers net thousands more at closing. $100M+ in fundraising, and counting The 40 alumni from the last cohort have raised over $100M in venture funding, and several have been accepted to Y Combinator. Stably, the 2025 winner, is now converting enterprise pilots into contracts and shipping new product lines in hours instead of weeks. Other teams from past cohorts, including Jigsaw Stack, Belli AI, and General Translation, have signed enterprise customers and formed partnerships through the program. Apply to the next cohort If you're an early-stage founder building in AI, you can apply for the next AI Accelerator program. We will open applications later this year. Visit our startup hub to learn more and connect with our startups team.

Alli Pope, Caroline Ciaramitaro, and 1 other

McKinsey's latest AI survey shows 65% of organizations now regularly use AI — nearly double from just ten months ago, with many using it to increase efficiency in critical areas like customer support. At Vercel, we integrated AI into our support workflow. Our AI agent reduced human-handled tickets by 31%, allowing us to maintain high support standards while serving a growing customer base. The challenge: balancing support quality with growth Customer support teams routinely handle a diverse range of customer inquiries, many of which involve repeatable processes. These can range from simple tasks like guiding customers to specific documentation pages, to helping customers through the process of configuring their domain. The landscape of customer support is pointing organizations toward building AI-powered chatbots as a critical component of their customer support strategy. Accordin

Alina WeinsteinSr. Product Marketing Manager

Every year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday reveal how people shop, browse, and discover products at global scale. For Vercel, the weekend doesn’t require a different operating mode. The platform behaves the same way it does every day, only with higher traffic volume. A live dashboard showed the traffic as it played out. This year, traffic reached more than 115.8 billion total requests, reflecting 33.6% year-over-year growth with consistent performance throughout the events. The traffic shape told a familiar story. Requests dipped on Thanksgiving as people stepped away from screens, then surged on Black Friday, stayed elevated through the weekend, and built into a second wave on Cyber Monday. These rhythms played out across every major geography, and the platform adapted continuously without configuration changes or manual intervention. Below is a snapshot of what the weekend looked like. Key metrics from the weekend 115,836,126,847 total requests - Global traffic delivered with consistent performance. 518,027 peak requests per second - Traffic delivered at peak demand 6,120,247 deployments - New versions of applications shipped 24,086,391 AI Gateway requests - AI routing kept responses fast across providers 43,213,555,901 Fluid compute invocations - Dynamic workloads scaled automatically 56,926,096,915 cache hits - Fast delivery directly from globally distributed regions 1,809,912,897 ISR reads - Initial regional loads of refreshed content, does not count cached responses 1,517,476,504 ISR writes - Catalog, pricing, and content updates propagated instantly. 7,507,223,309 firewall actions - Threats filtered before reaching applications 415,683,895 bots blocked - Automated abuse stopped early 2,408,122,336 humans verified - Legitimate shoppers passed security checks Top regions: US, DE, GB, IN, BR, SG, JP - with high activity across all 20 global regions Global scale and natural traffic rhythms Of the 115 billion requests that flowed through Vercel from November 28 through December 1, the United States led activity with over 40.7 billion requests, followed by Germany, the United Kingdom, India, Brazil, Singapore, and Japan. Traffic moved across time zones throughout the weekend, with peaks in one region balanced by lower activity in others. Vercel handled these shifts the same way it manages everyday production traffic, scaling the global network and compute layer to match real user behavior. AI Gateway supported AI-native shopping at global scale AI continued to shape how shoppers discovered products, searched catalogs, and received personalized help. More than 24 million AI requests passed through AI Gateway across the BFCM window. Retailers used AI for search, recommendations, guided browsing, and customer support. AI Gateway routed these queries across providers and regions, maintaining low latency and resilience even when demand fluctuated. AI is now part of the normal shopping experience. Routing, failover, and provider coordination are essential when millions of customers depend on AI-powered workflows. AI Gateway delivered this consistency at global scale. Fluid compute matched real traffic automatically Fluid compute handled more than 43.2 billion function invocations across the weekend. Teams used it for personalization logic, cart behavior, content evaluation, and AI inference. Fluid adjusts instantly to incoming traffic. Capacity increases the moment volume rises and scales back when demand settles. With automated pre-warming, and no tuning or configuration required. This elasticity is part of the platform’s normal operation and ensures applications stay responsive regardless of traffic shape. Incremental Static Regeneration kept content fresh and fast Product catalogs, pricing details, inventory indicators, and promotions changed continuously throughout the event. ISR processed more than 1.8 billion reads and 1.5 billion writes, refreshing content across the CDN without requiring redeploys or adding strain to backend systems. Shoppers received accurate information at static performance speeds, even as merchandisers updated content minute by minute. Security systems filtered billions of unwanted requests Security activity increased alongside customer traffic. More than 7.5 billion firewall actions were taken across system rules and customer-defined WAF logic. These protections stopped invalid and malicious traffic at the edge, preserving compute capacity and ensuring stable performance. Bot Management also operated at massive scale. More than 415 million bot attempts were identified and blocked, while more than 2.4 billion legitimate human interactions were verified through invisible checks by both Vercel BotID and system security defenses. Retailers protected checkout flows, inventory endpoints, and account systems without introducing friction. Caching delivered fast performance worldwide More than 56.9 billion requests were served directly from Vercel’s global cache. These cache hits reduced latency, decreased backend load, and ensured fast page delivery throughout the weekend. Caching works in tandem with ISR and Fluid compute, forming a multi-layer performance system where static assets stay fast, dynamic updates propagate instantly, and compute is reserved for real application logic. A platform built for everyday traffic, even when every day is bigger The 2025 traffic profile reinforces that large events do not require special preparation when the delivery layer is built to adapt to real user behavior. Cache hits, ISR updates, Fluid compute, AI routing, and firewall filtering worked together to absorb global demand. Development teams deployed more than 6.1 million times across the weekend, shipping updates continuously with the confidence provided by instant rollbacks and predictable reliability. Looking ahead As AI-driven experiences expand, as personalization deepens, and as global traffic patterns evolve, the infrastructure behind these applications must adapt at the speed of real users. Vercel’s software layer does this every day. Black Friday through Cyber Monday simply highlight the scale of normal operations. If you are preparing for your next peak moment, explore how AI Gateway, Fluid compute, ISR, and Vercel’s security tools fit into your architecture. The teams who thrive during high-pressure events are the ones who adopt adaptive infrastructure before they need it.

Dan FeinProduct