Vercel names 2026 Ship Award winners: Mercor takes Apex, Zapier wins Innovator
sonofalli · x · 2026-11-04
Vercel announced its 2026 Ship Awards under the theme "Craft is their signature," honoring teams pushing the agentic frontier.
- The Apex (hardest engineering problems): Mercor's security and engineering leads, whose goal is "make the secure path the fastest one" — scaling from a dozen projects to 2,000 without security becoming the bottleneck.
- The Innovator (redefining what's possible): Zapier's team, arguing "AI isn't the breakthrough. The breakthrough is who gets to build" — marketers, sellers, and engineers closest to the problem can ship their ideas.
- The post also highlights the author's customer conversations as their favorite part of the job.
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