Why the Web Is Being Rebuilt for Agents

Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel, interviewed by Molly O'Shea (Sourcery)

Guillermo Rauch is founder and CEO of Vercel, the cloud platform he started almost 11 years ago, and the creator of the open-source web framework Next.js. He grew up in Argentina, teaching himself English to learn to code. Vercel recently raised $300 million at a $9.3 billion valuation and, according to The Information, has about $600 million in annualized revenue. It has around 800 employees and counts companies such as OpenAI and Meta as customers.

Summary

Rauch says the shift is from a web of pages for humans to one of agents talking to agents. Coding agents' share of Vercel deployments went from 3% to 60% in a year, and Vercel added 1.5 billion deployments in 10 months after taking 10 years to reach the first billion. He wants businesses to present machine-readable information, tools and payments to agents, and warns that autonomous agents carry prompt-injection and sandbox-escape risk. His gateway shows 80% of tokens going to open models, and he says labs have little customer loyalty. He hires people who can command swarms of agents, communicate well and stay close to both code and customers. These signals are from an interview that Molly O'Shea did with Guillermo Rauch on Sourcery.

1. Deployments by Robots. Rauch says it took Vercel about 10 years to reach a billion deployments, and in the next 10 months it added another 1.5 billion. At the start of the year 3% of deployments came from coding agents, and now 60% do. Code is a liability, he says, because it can hold vulnerabilities and leak data, so it has to be treated responsibly, and code does nothing until it is deployed. Vercel has become the place where coding agents push their output, and he sees Vercel deployments in a lot of viral posts on X. ▶ 8:56