Who are Vercel's decision-makers?

Guillermo Rauch is the company's founder and has served as CEO since day one. Born in Argentina, Rauch built his engineering reputation through Socket.io (a widely used real-time web library) and a leadership role at Automattic (WordPress.com), where he oversaw the team that built WordPress's Calypso front-end. He is widely respected in the web development community and has driven Vercel's technical brand, open-source strategy, and the creation of Next.js — which now exceeds 500M annual downloads. As of April 2026, he has publicly signaled IPO readiness while acknowledging no fixed timeline.

Malte Ubl joined as CTO in 2022 after over a decade at Google, where he was a Principal Engineer and Engineering Director who led the AMP project. He owns Vercel's infrastructure architecture and the platform's performance technology including Fluid Compute, Turbopack, Edge Functions, and Vercel Sandbox. Tom Occhino joined as CPO in 2023 after many years at Meta/Facebook, where he was the Engineering Director overseeing React, React Native, and Relay — making him a natural fit for product strategy at the company that maintains Next.js, the AI SDK, and now the eve agent framework. Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, who spent nine years at Stripe as Chief Business Officer (growing Stripe from $100M to billions in revenue), joined as COO in early 2025 and oversees Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Revenue Operations, and Field Engineering. Ty Sbano serves as CISO and is the internal stakeholder for enterprise security reviews, SOC 2 compliance, and the newly launched Vercel Passport identity product.

Vercel's buying committee reflects its dual identity as a bottoms-up developer tool and an enterprise infrastructure platform. Engineering leadership (VP/CTO level) typically initiates evaluation and controls the technical champion role — they approve initial Vercel adoption at the team level. For Pro upgrades and multi-seat licenses, budget often sits with an Engineering Manager or Director of Engineering.

For Enterprise contracts, the committee expands materially. Jeanne DeWitt Grosser's COO mandate covers sales and revenue operations, making her the senior GTM owner of enterprise deals. Procurement, Legal, and InfoSec are involved in compliance, SOC 2, SSO, and data residency discussions — Ty Sbano (CISO) is the key internal stakeholder for security reviews and a direct counterpart for security vendors. Finance and CFO-level approval is typical on multi-year Enterprise commitments above $100K ARR. For AI infrastructure and agent tooling, Tom Occhino (CPO) and Malte Ubl (CTO) are the relevant technical decision-makers. The champion is almost always a developer or engineering leader; the economic buyer is usually a VP Engineering or CTO.

Vercel operated as a relatively flat, engineering-led organization for most of its history. The 2022–2025 executive hires signal a deliberate shift toward a more functionally mature structure: a CTO to own infrastructure and platform engineering (Malte Ubl, 2022), a CPO to own the product org and roadmap (Tom Occhino, 2023), and a COO to own the entire revenue motion (Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, 2025). The board was further strengthened in December 2025 with Susan St. Ledger (ex-HashiCorp President of Worldwide Field Operations) and Mitchell Hashimoto (HashiCorp co-founder) — both experienced in scaling infrastructure companies to enterprise maturity.

At ~915 employees and growing, Vercel is in the organizational phase where go-to-market processes are being formalized: the COO's build-out of a structured sales and CS organization follows the playbook Grosser ran at Stripe. Sellers should expect increasingly formal procurement requirements, defined enterprise deal cycles, longer security review timelines (especially post the April 2026 OAuth breach incident), and a growing legal review process for Enterprise contracts. The company's stated aspiration to operate "with the discipline of a public entity" further suggests a trajectory toward more structured vendor management.