Vercel is acquiring African startups like Stackpack from Cairo and BetterAuth from Ethiopia because the next wave of infrastructure innovation is happening there, not in Silicon Valley. Both companies build agentic infrastructure, software that runs itself through AI agents. The real play is talent: finding the engineers building self-running software in places nobody expected.
The next wave of infrastructure builders is actually coming from Africa, not Silicon Valley. Vercel just proved it by buying 2 startups in 1 month, both built by African founders. The first is Stackpack from Cairo, where George Fahmy bootstrapped it for 2 years before raising a single dollar. He raised $500,000 led by P1 Ventures, which also backed BetterAuth, the company Vercel bought from an Ethiopian founder 2 weeks earlier. Both build agentic infrastructure, which means software that runs itself instead of software that people run. So instead of an engineer, uh, fixing servers at 2 AM, an AI agent does the work. Look, Vercel isn't buying companies here. They're buying the people who build software that runs itself, and they're finding them in places you'd never think to look. Follow for more.
