The Vercel Ai Accelerator Is Back With $6m In Credits

Building an AI business is no small feat. Delivering a great agentic product requires infrastructure that handles deployment, security, and scale automatically, but that's table stakes. Startups also need community support, mentorship, investor connections, platform credits, and visibility.

That's why we created the Vercel AI Accelerator. Last year, we hosted our second cohort of 40 early-stage teams from across the globe. They joined us for six weeks of learning, building, and shipping, hearing from speakers in leadership at AWS, Anthropic, Cursor, Braintrust, MongoDB, HubSpot, Vercel, and more. The program culminated with a demo day in San Francisco that drew hundreds from across the industry.

This year, the Accelerator is back with another cohort of 40 teams building the future of AI. Applications are open now until February 16th.

Program benefits

The AI Accelerator provides access to thousands of dollars in credits from Vercel, v0, AWS, and a variety of AI platforms. Participants also get to join an exclusive group of AI builders within the Vercel Community. Here are the full details:

• Credits from Vercel, v0, AWS, and leading AI platforms, including Anthropic, Cursor, ElevenLabs, Hugging Face, Cartesia, Roboflow, Modal, Julius.ai, Sentry, Vanta, Auth0, Browserbase, WorkOS, Supabase, Autonoma, and Neon

• Join an exclusive group of AI builders within the Vercel Community to share progress and exchange ideas during the program

• Participate in weekly sessions with industry leaders connect you directly with AI startup founders, investors, and technical leaders through fireside chats and office hours

• Access production-focused guides, templates, and videos designed to accelerate development cycles and help ship faster

• Present your product to industry leaders and VCs at demo day, creating visibility and potential fundraising opportunities

Platform credits and prizes

Every company accepted into the Accelerator receives thousands of dollars in credits from partner platforms. Finalists earn over $100K each in additional credit prizes, providing the compute and infrastructure resources needed to build and scale AI applications without operational overhead.

Six weeks of focused development

The 40 selected teams will join us from March 2nd to April 16th for six weeks of building and networking.

The program includes:

• Direct access to leading AI builders

• Exclusive AI content

• Community connections

• Optional IRL meet ups

• Welcome and mid-point goal check-ins

• Mentorship from VC partners

The program ends with a demo day in San Francisco on April 16th:

• The audience will include leaders and investors

• Judges will select 3 winners to receive over $100k in resources

• The first-place winner will receive an investment from Vercel Ventures

Our previous demo day featured product launches from 26 teams and attracted hundreds of industry professionals. Judges from AWS, Vercel, Cursor, Modal, OpenAI, and Roboflow selected the winners.

Since that event, several teams have raised venture funding rounds, secured enterprise customers, and established partnerships through connections made during the accelerator.

Infrastructure for AI development

We continue investing across the AI stack, from SDKs to templates, supporting how developers build modern apps and agents. Recent AI releases include Workflow DevKit, Sandboxes, Skills.sh, and git support in v0.

These tools are designed to handle infrastructure automatically so teams can focus on building AI products. Companies like Sensay, Chatbase, and Leonardo.ai are built with Next.js and deployed on Vercel.

Focus on what matters

AI agents can now operate autonomously on code, making decisions and taking actions without constant human oversight. This shift requires infrastructure that scales automatically and handles operational complexity behind the scenes. Vercel provides that foundation, giving startups the freedom to focus on building AI applications that solve real problems.

In our last cohort we backed early-stage teams like Stably AI, Cervo, Bear AI, and General Translation.

Apply to the Vercel AI Accelerator and join a cohort of developers building AI applications that operate independently and scale automatically. Applications close February 16th.

Applicants must be Vercel customers at or above the age of majority in your jurisdiction. Applicants must be able to commit to the full 6 weeks of the program. Applicants must not be located in, or otherwise subject to restrictions imposed by, U.S. sanctions laws.We are looking for pre-seed ideas. Applications will be judged based on quality of submission, founder background, and overall potential for impact and scalability.

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