Vercel

Hailing from Lanús, Argentina, Rauch dropped out of high school and moved to San Francisco at 18 for his first frontend engineering job. In his teens, he created foundational open-source projects including Socket.IO (realtime bidirectional communication) and Mongoose (MongoDB object modeling), both of which saw wide adoption. He co-founded LearnBoost, an education platform, and founded Cloudup, a file-sharing startup — both acquired by Automattic in 2013. In 2015, he founded ZEIT (later renamed Vercel) and created Next.js, the React framework that became the company's cornerstone product. A consistent advocate for developer experience and frontend-first architectures, Rauch has publicly positioned Vercel at the intersection of AI and the web, releasing v0, an AI code generation agent, as a natural extension of that thesis.

Co-founded Vercel (originally ZEIT) in 2015 alongside Guillermo Rauch and Tony Kovanen. Prior to Vercel, he was a committer to the Socket.IO real-time engine, the open-source project created by Rauch. That collaboration led to co-founding the company that would go on to build the Next.js framework, the v0 AI development agent, and the edge deployment platform now valued at over $9 billion. Kanezawa is an engineer by background who has remained deeply hands-on in Vercel's product and infrastructure work throughout the company's journey from a serverless deployment startup to an AI cloud platform.

Co-founded Vercel (originally ZEIT) in 2015 alongside Guillermo Rauch and Naoyuki Kanezawa, serving as CTO. Co-created Next.js, the React framework that became Vercel's flagship open-source project. Prior to Vercel, contributed to Gatsby, Socket.IO, and WordPress. Studied at the University of Helsinki, where he was drawn out of academia by the chance to work on open-source software full-time. Described as a "programmer's programmer" who prefers staying out of the spotlight — a deliberate counterpoint to Vercel's more visible CEO. After leaving Vercel, became a founding engineer at Mastra, building an open-source AI agent framework, and also served as co-CTO at Token Terminal.