Grace Ashiru
American cloud platform Vercel has acquired Stakpak, an Egyptian-founded startup building open-source autonomous DevOps agents — its second purchase of an African company in the space of a month, and its second exit for P1 Ventures’ portfolio.
The deal follows Vercel’s acquisition of Better Auth, founded by Ethiopian developer Bereket Engida, which was confirmed just last week. Financial terms of the Stakpak transaction were not disclosed.
Founded in 2022 by CEO George Fahmy, Stakpak built an AI-powered platform that automates cloud infrastructure management — effectively functioning as an autonomous DevOps engineer for software teams. The company says its agent can compress a task that would take a human developer four hours into roughly 50 minutes. Stakpak raised a $500,000 pre-seed round in 2025 led by P1 Ventures, and Fahmy deliberately built the company for the US market from day one, a bet that appears to have paid off.
For Vercel — the $9.3 billion company behind the Next.js framework, now reportedly running at a $340 million revenue run rate — the acquisition fits a clear thesis. CEO Guillermo Rauch has argued that the next generation of software will be built and operated not just by humans but by autonomous agents that need to be deployed, authenticated, and managed. Better Auth supplies the agent identity piece; Stakpak brings two years of hands-on experience running agents in production environments, plus hard-won knowledge of what agentic infrastructure actually breaks in the real world.
The Stakpak team will join Vercel as part of the deal.
The bigger story for the continent: two African-founded developer-tools startups exiting to one of Silicon Valley’s most-watched infrastructure companies within weeks of each other is a strong signal that African technical talent is building products global acquirers want — and that early backers like P1 Ventures are starting to see that thesis convert into returns.
