Meet the 2026 Vercel AI Accelerator Cohort
Vercel announced the 2026 AI Accelerator cohort of 39 early-stage AI teams from across the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America who will build on Vercel infrastructure for six weeks with access to $8M+ in partner credits, weekly mentorship, and guidance from founders and technical leaders.
The Vercel AI Accelerator is back, and this year we selected 39 early-stage teams from across the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America to build with us for six weeks.
The next generation of AI startups is building on our , and the accelerator is how we work directly with the earliest-stage founders among them. This year’s cohort spans every industry, at varying points in their journey, but they share a clear point of view on what needs to exist right now and the urgency to ship it.self-driving infrastructure
Teams in the program get access to Vercel infrastructure, (AWS, Anthropic, OpenAI, Cartesia, ElevenLabs, and more), weekly sessions with founders and technical leaders, and dedicated VC mentors.$8M+ in partner credits
— Founder: Joe HarrisAlloy
Alloy Robotics turns terabytes of robot data into instant debugging, analysis, and reporting.
— Founders: Pablo Diaz-Granados, Jay Katyan, Griffin OguraArchival
Archival reveals how teams are actually using AI. With workflow-level visibility and analytics, leaders can improve AI adoption and ROI.
— Founder: Tony HunterAres
Ares is a revenue command center, a single surface to find, engage, close, and grow revenue, powered by agents that work across your customer data.
— Founders: Al Dram, Coco CaoBlueprints AI
Blueprints AI is an autonomous AI agent that generates construction blueprints.
— Founders: Jungkeun Hong (CEO), Tim Phuan (CTO)Carbyn AI
Carbyn AI is Claude Code for machinists, with AI glasses that capture tribal knowledge and coach operators in real time.
— Founders: Amy Xiao, Kevin Dela RosaCloudglue
Cloudglue is the context layer for video, enabling users, AI agents, and applications to understand and work across video at scale.
— Founders: Nadia Eldeib, Jared CosulichCodeYam
CodeYam introduces simulations to create a powerful AI-native software development experience.
— Founder: Wassim GharbiCoreviz
An AI-native media workspace that understands, organizes, and edits your organization's photos and videos with AI.
— Founders: Mani HK, Sures Kumar TSGrid58
Grid58 is the operating system for making software, enabling you to understand what to build, research, design, and code.
— Founders: Zayne Zhang, Mohan Pedhapati, Harsh JaiswalHacktron AI
Hacktron is your AI teammate for security. As AI accelerates the volume of code being written, vulnerabilities scale with it. Hacktron integrates into your development lifecycle to find and remediate real, exploitable issues.
— Founders: Nick Bae, Tim TongHiveBase
Plug in your tools, get an AI Chief of Staff, a living company brain, and agents that run your code, marketing, GTM, and strategy.
— Founders: Sam Forrester, Evan Eissler, Jack NeilHotfix
Hotfix is an AI production operator that connects to your codebase and cloud infrastructure to fix issues as they happen.
— Founder: David CoxIntegrated Reasoning
Integrated Reasoning is building ARROW, the world's first wafer-scale solver for mixed integer linear programming.
— Founder: Maggie ChenJudea
Judea is an autonomous agent that continuously optimizes your product on autopilot. Simply define your target metric, and Judea handles the rest.
— Founders: Kratik Agrawal, Varun KandulaKinect
Kinect is building dynamic storefronts for human and agent customers, an intelligent AI brand layer that adapts to each visitor.
— Founders: Martina Belluomini, Ana GorodischKuvia
Kuvia develops AI for digital pathology to detect cancer biomarkers and expand access to precision cancer care.
— Founders: Jack Clark, Jorge ArmentaLane
Lane is payments and commerce infrastructure for the agentic web, giving AI agents the ability to buy on your behalf and sellers a way to reach them.
— Founders: Johnny Hung, Munam WasiMighty
Mighty stops AI-powered fraud before it happens. The security gateway protects AI agents across text, images, and documents in real time.
— Founders: Juan Djuwadi, Neel MakhechaMilq
Milq is Lovable for iOS — a delightful Mac app for building Swift applications.
— Founders: Samarth Shyam, Agrim SinghNiyam AI
Niyam AI is building the control plane for hardware manufacturing.
— Founder: Usman AhmedNura
Nura is the AI copilot for real estate development, automating zoning, feasibility, and pro forma analysis.
— Founder: Adam SagerOpenVet
OpenVet is an AI hospital for every animal on earth, advancing veterinary medicine with the first outcome-based biological dataset across all species.
— Founders: Zechen Zhang, Amber Jiachen LiuOrchestra Research
Orchestra Research is building the Jarvis for Science and democratizing science for everyone.
— Founders: Gigi Grimes, Everhett GrimesPai
Pai builds digital twins of your real customers so you can test products, ads, and messaging in minutes.
— Founders: Shivani Bajaj, Shantanu PrakashPartly
Partly is building the data intelligence layer for agent-assisted hardware commerce.
— Founders: Sohum Patel, Mattijs De PaepePenelope Health
Penelope is the API and MCP layer for US medical payments — building the largest corpus of payer policies to reduce medical claim denials.
— Founders: Alex Junod, Cristian BesliuProxieLabs
ProxieLabs replaces slow, expensive market research with AI-powered conjoint analysis, delivering validated consumer preference data in minutes.
— Founders: Merlin Kafka, Lewis BlackwoodRex
Rex is an AI platform for operational finance work. Rex unifies customer context across finance systems so agents can run AR processes end to end.
— Founders: Lauren Self, David GolovinRoots
Roots offers the easiest way to buy and sell homes. Buyers save $100s to $1000s monthly, while sellers net $1000s more at closing.
— Founders: Akshay Murthy, Sarthak GuptaSentia Labs
Behavioral Intelligence Layer for Product Teams
— Founders: Henry Mao, Anirudh KamathSmithery
Smithery is building the connectivity infrastructure to enable the agent economy.
— Founder: Brad BitlerTakeoff
Takeoff is an AI travel platform that helps consumers plan better trips and helps hotels and travel brands reach them at the moment of discovery.
— Founders: Catherine Zhou, Michael WuTruli
Truli builds AI agents that help food, supplement, and beverage brands stay compliant.
— Founders: Ao Fu, Gagan DevagiriVakoi AI
Vakoi AI delivers customized immersive ads in video games at scale.
— Founders: Jihyun Kim, Cashel FitzgeraldZomma
Zomma is a computer-use agent that handles sales and application support for enterprise: 24/7, global, and grounded in your SOPs
On March 18th, we're bringing the cohort together with the entire Vercel ecosystem for Builder Day at our new San Francisco headquarters. The day will include a fireside chat with Guillermo Rauch (Vercel CEO) and Stephen Haney ( CEO), as well as office hours with our accelerator partners.Paper
From there, teams will have four weeks to refine and ship, leading up to Demo Day on April 16th in San Francisco. Each team will present what they've built to AI leaders, VCs, and builders, and judges will select three winners to receive over $100K in credits and prizes from Vercel and our partners, including an investment from Vercel Ventures for the first-place team.
Past accelerator teams like Stably AI, Cervo, and Bear AI have gone on to raise venture rounds, land enterprise customers, and form partnerships through the program. Follow along as this year's cohort builds over the next six weeks.
Meet the 2026 cohort
What's next for the cohort
Source: original entry ↗
More from Vercel
Follow Vercel to get its new changes in your feed and email digest.
OpenAI Decisions API now available on AI Gateway
OpenAI's Decisions API is now accessible through Vercel's AI Gateway with an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, enabling decision models to answer typed questions and return probabilities, choices, and scores for routing, triage, and guardrails use cases. Support is available across the OpenAI SDK, AI SDK, HTTP API, and CLI with the latest versions.
Timestamp attributes now supported in Vercel Flags
Vercel Flags now supports timestamp attributes for entities, allowing you to create time-based targeting rules. Use this feature to run limited-time campaigns, show content between specific dates, or target users based on registration date.
Glyph Cluster now available in stealth on AI Gateway
Glyph Cluster, a reasoning model for coding and long-context analysis, is now available as a stealth model on Vercel's AI Gateway for Pro and Enterprise plan teams with purchased AI Gateway credits at no cost during the stealth period. The model supports function calling, streams responses, and can be accessed via AI SDK, OpenAI-compatible APIs, and coding agents.