Web development solution provider Vercel has announced a $21 million Series A round of funding it will use to improve the front-end development experience for JavaScript developers.
Vercel, which was previously known as ZEIT, was founded by the creators of the Next.js framework. The company changed its name to align with its new focus of providing the “ultimate workflow for developing, previewing and shipping Jamstack sites,” and bridge the gap between development feedback and release.
The Jamstack architecture refers to JavaScript, APIs, and markup. According to Guillermo Rauch, co-founder of Vercel, Jamstack has enabled the frontend to be split from the backend to make site development even faster and independent. Vercel aims to provide a workflow that enables an all-in-one solution for static and Jamstack deployment as well as serverless functions and global CDN. Some of its features include the ability to work out of the box with any web framework, the ability to collaborate with others, automatic SSL, and simple deployments. Recent updates to the platform include simpler pricing, environment variables UI, and cancelable deployments.
“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,” the team wrote in a blog post.
“Front end developers want to create amazing experiences for users, not wrestle with complexities of configuring servers, clusters, compilers, and build systems,” added Rauch. “We saw an opportunity to re-think the entire workflow for the world’s 11 million JavaScript developers, to give them superior developer experience, and to give their users the best performance on the web.”
The Series A round of funding was led by Accel, CRV, with additional investors such as React creator Jordan Walke, and GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
“Because of its impact on customer experience, the front end is becoming much more important. Vercel re-imagines the front end using modern serverless architecture and leading frameworks. Their workflow seamlessly orchestrates code, hosting, testing, and collaboration into a simple, unified experience. Vercel brings huge advantages to front end teams that move fast and ship code frequently,” said Dan Levine, partner at Accel.
