June 2021 Summaries

Today, Vercel announced its Series C funding, a major milestone in its mission to build a faster web, with $102 million of additional investment at a valuation greater than $1 billion. This comes as the company experiences incredible momentum, doubling traffic on its edge network and quadrupling weekly deployments over the past six months. The funding round is led by existing investor Bedrock Capital, with participation from other investors, and marks a significant increase in the number of homepages using Next.js, now accounting for 50% of Alexa top 10,000 sites. Vercel has also tripled its enterprise customer base, with companies like Hashicorp, GitHub, IBM, McDonald's, and Facebook choosing to build and host their websites on the platform.

Next.js 11 continues its mission to provide the best user and developer experience possible, with updates such as the new Script component and automatic size detection in the Image component. These changes improve loading performance and reduce Cumulative Layout Shift, creating a smoother user experience. The framework also introduces Conformance, a set of guardrails and defaults that help developers make informed decisions for their applications. Additionally, Next.js Live brings real-time collaboration to web development, allowing teams to share collaborative URLs and work together instantly in the browser.