Vercel, a startup founded by the creators of the popular Next.js web framework, today announced it has raised $21 million, closing a series A funding led by Accel, CRV, and additional investors including React creator Jordan Walke, and GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

Vercel's cloud platform optimizes the entire development and deployment experience for frontend teams. Built by the team behind Next.js, React's most popular web framework, Vercel provides a Javascript workflow and serverless edge deployment model that redefines developer experience and site performance.

"Vercel is like AWS for the front end," said Dan Levine, Partner at Accel. "Over the last decade, backend capabilities have evolved rapidly thanks to open source and the public cloud. The front end has lagged. That's changing with new technology stacks powered by Javascript, React, and web frameworks like Next.js. 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".

"Front end developers want to create amazing experiences for users, not wrestle with complexities of configuring servers, clusters, compilers, and build systems," said Guillermo Rauch, co-founder at Vercel. "We saw an opportunity to re-think the entire workflow for the world's 11 million Javascript developers, to give them a superior developer experience, and to give their users the best site performance on the web."

Vercel, formerly known as Zeit, is the company behind Next.js, the leading React framework chosen by enterprises and a key technology in the Jamstack architecture (JavaScript / APIs / Markup). Jamstack is redefining web development by focusing on separating the frontend from the back-end with new abstraction methods that favor a dramatically improved developer experience and site performance. Next.js was recently a featured project at the Chrome Developer Summit, where the Google Chrome team highlighted its work with the Next.js community for build and runtime optimizations that matter most for frontend development. More than 30,000 production sites at companies like Airbnb, GoDaddy (case study), Hulu (case study), Nike, Ticketmaster, and Uber are running Next.js today.

About Accel
Accel is an early and growth-stage venture capital firm that powers a global community of entrepreneurs. Accel backs entrepreneurs who have what it takes to build a world-class, category-defining business.

Founded in 1983, Accel brings more than three decades of experience building and supporting hundreds of companies. Accel's vision for entrepreneurship and business enables it to identify and invest in the companies that will be responsible for the growth of next-generation industries.

Accel-backed companies include Atlassian, Braintree, Cloudera, DJI, Dropbox, Dropcam, Etsy, Facebook, Flipkart, Lookout Security, MoPub, Qualtrics, Slack, Spotify, Supercell, Vox Media and others.

About CRV
CRV has been a leading investor in high-growth technology companies for nearly half a century, focusing on enterprise, consumer and bioengineering. The firm has backed over 400 startups in its nearly 50-year history, including some of the biggest tech exits in the last few years including Dropbox, PillPack, Ring, Twitter, and Zendesk. CRV has offices located in San Francisco and Palo Alto, CA, and Cambridge, MA. Please visit CRV.com for more information and follow us on Twitter @CRV.

About Vercel
Vercel is transforming web development by modernizing how frontend teams develop, preview and ship JavaScript. Founded and backed by executives and investors behind JavaScript's most widely used framework (Next.js) and library (React), Vercel gives developers the scale, reliability and performance benefits they need to focus on delighting their users. Venture-backed by Accel and CRV, Vercel (twitter @vercel) is headquartered in San Francisco.