Vercel raises $300M primary and $300M secondary at $9.3B valuation, bets on AI cloud and agentic SDK

jokes about not knowing about sports and then of course I try to talk about sports and get [laughter] brutally mix up a team. But our next guest is GMO Ralph from Versel. Welcome to the TBPN Ultradome. GMO, how are you doing? Do you know about sports? I know you know Counter Strike. Do you know sports?

I know a lot about Counter-Strike. I know some about soccer being from Argentina. Okay. Right. Baseline and jiu-jitsu, which I just started doing. So, I know as much as one class, but I'm ready. Okay. Okay. Did you get brutally injured in the first class? Because No, I brutally overcame cuz I boxed for many years.

Oh, I had some baseline. Fighting me. I I I I got into jiu-jitsu briefly and it's like so it's an incredible workout. It's so fun. It's like perfectly competitive and skill-based, you know? you can like clearly level up.

And then I just saw that like every guy in the gym that was over 40 that had been doing it for like 20 years would just be like hobbling in, you know, all these different injuries. And I got I got I got a little scared around, you know, destroying all of my joints.

But, um, yeah, but I guess if you're in the right gym, uh, it's probably better for longevity. Yeah, we're working down the tech checklist, you know. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Jiu-Jitsu, more to come. Um, well, we missed you a week ago. We've been boopping around, but uh, give us the latest news in Verscell World.

Uh, what's the latest on your side? Well, I mean, the big one is our funding at $9. 3 billion valuation. Uh, 300. It really had that. It's awesome. Congratulations. Insane. Insane. Um, oh yes. 300 million in primary, 300 million secondary, led by I don't know if you can hear, but this is a good omen.

The gong is still ringing. Still ringing. Still ringing a little bit. Did it ever stop? It never stopped. It might never stop. Yeah. Yeah. You might be back here with the series G before it stops ringing hopefully. Uh what's the uh what what what are you actually capital constrained on?

Is it just hire more people, build a better product? Are you actually like a big consumer of AI data factories, token factories? Are you spending a lot on inference right now? Well, clearly not too capital constrained because half of it was secondary. Yeah.

So, chapter one of Versel was providing the developer experience to developers to build pages. Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm being overly simplistic, right? But the world is going from pages to agents. Yeah.

So, it's not that the web services of the internet are going to be irrelevant, but if you think about the cloud, the cloud was born with Amazon web services. The next chapter of the internet is going to be AI services.

So, Verscell is building the AI cloud and we felt and obviously investors felt this way too that this is worth you know a very very big bet because every type of software will become AI native software and the new primitive of the cloud will be the agent and and this requires new services. It requires new frameworks.

Something that developer developers and investors are really excited about is our AI SDK. You can think of it of it as the React of AI.

So the most popular package for developers to use to build AI agents and it's growing basically vertically like never like something we've never seen before at Versell and we've been doing open source for a long time.

Is that driven by new new ideas, new companies, uh, startups that are, uh, coming up and instead of spinning up just a website or a web app, they're spinning up an actual agent that then they get new customers for. Is is that right? It's mostly net new customers.

It's a lot of net new, but also I think a lot of enterprises are going to basically leapfrog their classic digital transformation journey. Sure. And just go to agents directly. Yeah. And what this is resulting in is a a whole new set of demands for the cloud that were never there before.

Software is running for a lot longer, which is fascinating from a compute standpoint. Obviously, investors are excited about GPU compute, but now we're seeing all of these new types of software that just running like thinking and and producing obviously demanding tokens, but running for minutes, hours, days.

We call these workflows. Yeah. And so we hosted our versel ship AI conference the other day and we basically came with an actual definition of what an agent is.

And agents basically remind us a lot of the old types of software that people were excited about maybe maybe decades ago which is like this workflows and business processes that you know look like nodes connected in a graph and have all of these steps.

It turns out that kind of software which we'll now call agent is actually kind of hard for developers to write especially the ones that were you know used to creating like the typical SAS type of software. So Versel is sort of becoming the default place where this new kind of agentic workflow is born.

How are you thinking about hardware or your own cloud your own physical infrastructure? It feels like that was crazy to talk about 5 years ago but now there's there are neoclouds there. I I know I know people who have just stood up whole data centers.

And so if you came to me and said, "Yeah, as part of this fundraising round, we're also going to spin up a couple different data centers and we're going to be on our own infrastructure in a few years. " I'd be like, "Yeah, that doesn't sound crazy to me at all. " But how are you thinking about it?

Well, Versell is in this incredibly unique position that developers come to us because of the developer experience. Sure. We can actually automatically make the best infrastructure decisions on their behalf. Okay. And today that's sitting on top of the hyperscalers because much flexibility. Yeah.

So, for example, a couple years ago, you could have made the wrong hardware decision because you were going to say, well, all my CPU workloads are going to be like short burst, really immediate, CPUbound, rendering based.

Well, it turns out that a lot of the new workloads are agents that are spending a lot of time thinking. So, you need new kinds of compute. You need new kinds of software infrastructure to support these workloads. And I believe that the hyperscaler clouds still give us the most flexibility there.

Also keep in mind that a lot a lot of these agents need to be in close proximity to the enterprise data. Yeah. So yeah, the neo clouds are exciting, but you kind of want to be in the cloud. Yeah. From a security perspective, regulatory and also latency.

I do think there's something to the cloud that is a bit of a rich get-richer scenario when it comes to latency because you need to fetch data. You need to do rag. you need to get actual context into the models and every millisecond of latency that you waste there is actually very very costly.

So on one hand you know proximity to the cloud and being in the cloud gives us a great advantage. On the other hand because we offer services like our AI gateway we also make them compete fanatically. So at NexJS Conf we uh we announced the Nex.

js evals which is basically what I call sort of the like oracle of truth of how good your model is at coding real world workloads with things like Nex. js. Here's a Oh, sorry. Yeah, I was going to say our developers really benefit from the fact that we let them choose. Yeah. They're not bound to specific model.

Uh how are you thinking about integrations with consumer AI apps?

I feel like there's a world where I go to Gemini or I go to chatbt and I am iterating through a prompt and kind of laying out the let's say I want to make a landing page for a new start and I and I've kind of figured out the value props and the customer testimonials and how I'm going to wireframe everything out and then I I want to actually deploy it.

Right now, I don't think I can do that within any of the consumergrade chat apps. Um, they're going to kick me over and say, "Hey, go set up this account. " But there's a world where that doesn't need to happen. Um, but it's a delicate balance because you don't want them to be like, "Now we're on top of you and fully.

" And so, how are you thinking about like uh onboarding like almost like proumer creators? Yeah. So, on my blog, I drew this parallels between the cloud 1.

0 know and the AI cloud and so you have you know the the child poster child of of frameworks was react and XJS now it's going to be the AI SDK before we had CDN for delivering pages and images now we have the CDN of tokens the AI gateway and one of the other big transitions that's going to happen is protocol so we we're going from HTTP to things like MCB Mhm.

MCP is really exciting because if you looked at how Chad GBD is now allowing you to embed apps inside of Chad GBD that also just came out a couple weeks ago. I went to Nex. js I was able to deploy Doom inside of Chad GBD. Why?

Because we have an MCB integration that allows our customers to embed themselves inside of Chad GBD. This is really exciting. If this takes off, this is the world that you just described. But anybody can look up an app. Yeah. Does does OpenAI have like a review process for that?

Uh because I haven't just like run into the I I do run into those like hydrated UI elements every once in a while. If I'm asking for like movie reviews, it'll show me some pictures or like links baked in, but it's all kind of like pre-baked UI.

Yeah, you need to be working on creating your own studio Giblly moment around that. Yeah, this feels really really big actually. Uh so yeah. Yeah. Tell me more about like how this actually rolls out. Yeah. So on a vertical level is MCB.

So as long as you have something like versel, you deploy your thing, you can speak MCB, you're embedded into chatbd. I deploy my app in developer mode, which means like they let you basically embed everything.

It's going to be a little bit like an Apple app store where you're going to have to get approved, but it's it seems like, you know, that the their guidelines are pretty open. So I think a lot of it will fly. And to your point, this allows ejection points from Chad GBD into other kinds of platforms.

So you could imagine one where if you start up cooking up an idea, it recommends V0 because Verscell registered an application with them and this is the right application to for prototyping and VIP coding. In fact, the other day while I was in developer mode, it started recommending things to me.

Uh so I guess some of the early adopters of their apps platform. I believe MCB will continue to enable this sort of like agent to agent communication.

This is already very big when you're coding with agents because in order to you know for example would be Figma converted to vzero so you can convert from Figma to NexJS app that's going to speak the MCP protocol. Yeah.

So I think for as far as the AI cloud goes, enterprises will be wrestling with these questions, right? Like the the most common question I get is how do I not get this intermediated by Google AI overviews, right?

Which is sort of summarizing all of the results of the search pages and how do I not get this intermediate by CHBD? And I think they're really good answers. Mhm. How do you think about M&A?

you don't have to talk about M&A interest in Verscell because I'm sure you're turning down uh stuff all the time, but how are you thinking about uh uh you know M&A in terms of expanding and and building on on the existing platform? Yeah, there were so many uh investments being put into the AI categories, right?

And uh vertical agents, coding agents, idees, things like this. I think you know there's going to be more consolidation in the coming months and years. uh there's like 10 20 different options for anything you can conceive AI related AI for QA AI for testing AI for this.

So I think creates a lot of opportunities for Verscell which is a very broad platform with lots of users to sort of make some strategic M&A but I'm even more excited about our marketplace. So we announced at Versel Ship AI our marketplace for oneclick install of AI agents and AI infrastructure services.

So, I mentioned if you're going to sit down and create your own agent, it's very likely you're going to need some services that Versell doesn't offer. One example is browsers on demand.

I think you guys have had a couple browser CEOs here on the show and uh so Versel doesn't offer browsers as a service built in, but now we offer it one click through the marketplace. Sure. Another example is security audits that AI agents can help with oneclick install uh services like corridor.

uh because forcell contains the deployment URL and we have access to the code and we have access to the production data. It gives us a very special place so that we can grow a massive ecosystem of agents that automate the cloud. We're going to create some of those agents.

We might acquire a few but overall I'm very excited about becoming sort of the nexus where all of the agents are collaborating together so they take the burden off of maintaining the cloud. We also the the outage the other day with US East one the internet melted down.

You know all of those pagers or mattresses were waking up people. Our vision for the future of the cloud is that they wake up agents. The agent has the first pass of like oh my god anomaly alert 500 errors. All right let's have the versel agent do the first pass.

But this is also true for you know you vibe coded something and you want a security engineer to review it for you. Well, now that's an agent you you can one click install through the Verscell agent marketplace. Uh, which is very very exciting. Yeah, that's awesome. Uh, I mean, what an interesting place to be.

You can you're you have so many different pieces of the business and I imagine that um a lot of them are are, you know, growing business lines. I can imagine uh the series F process was a lot of fun. Uh yeah. Uh given given all the booms. Jordy, anything else? No, this is great. Great to get the update.

Yeah, thanks so much for hopping on. Uh have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon, Gamma. Cheers. See you. Bye. Uh, he mentioned eight sleep. Let's talk about our sleep scores. How'd you sleep? We need to sleep. We need to talk to Matteo. And I I don't want this. I don't want the the John handicap.

Any you have you have a conspiracy theory that like for some reason it just gives