Vercel, the well-funded front-end development platform from the team behind Next.js, today announced that it has acquired Turborepo, a high-performance build system for JavaScript and TypeScript monorepos, an increasingly popular way for organizing source code into a single repository that includes all of the necessary packages to build an application.
As part of this acquisition, Vercel is open sourcing the Turborepo command-line interface and giving Turborepo users a path for migrating their caching infrastructure to Vercel. Turborepo founder Jared Palmer will join Vercel to lead its build performance team. He will also continue to work on the Turborepo project.
When I last talked to Vercel co-founder and CEO Guillermo Rauch, he noted that “strategic acquisitions are always on the table” for the company. He noted that for a lot of companies, scaling their front-ends often becomes a major hassle, with increasingly long build times and teams that can reach hundreds of people.
“Turborepo is a build system that sits atop of Next.js. It allows you to diversify your investment in different front-end projects and solutions. You can combine Next.js, Svelte, Vue.js and so on, while giving the team this organizational primitive, as well as really fast builds because the system can intelligently decide what to build and what to reuse across our teams. I’ve sometimes likened it to the Tesla self-driving fleet, where one car learns — and the whole fleet learns. In the case of this build system, when one team builds, those artifacts that are produced are shared by the entire organization. This way, everyone becomes faster and learns and gets helped by the efforts of the other teams.”
The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition, but Vercel does have a nice war chest to make these moves now that it has raised a total of $313 million, with the last round valuing it at $2.5 billion.
“We saw an incredible amount of complexity in the way most frontend development teams build, test, and deploy their code and set out to create the best way to scale and build a frontend codebase. Turborepo gives developers the ability to manage this complexity without the maintenance burden that comes with traditional monorepo architectures,” said Palmer in today’s announcement. “The combination of Turborepo with Vercel’s build time and build infrastructure bridges the gap between what every developer needs and what, until now, only the hyperscalers have had. It’s somewhat magical, and also really, really, really ridiculously fast. This is the platform for the future of business on the web.”
Turborepo had not raised any external funding before this acquisition, but it was looking to raise its first round, which Vercel effectively pre-empted with this acquisition, as Rauch told me. The companies are not disclosing the terms of the deal.