StepFun vs Vercel

StepFun — Foundation Models · Private · $10B valuation · 2 of 2 figures sourced  |  Vercel — Application · Private · $9.3B valuation · 4 of 4 figures sourced

Relationship

Step Plan and Vercel AI Gateway both serve buyers who need to serve a model in production; similar scale (private).

Assembled from the recorded fields for this pair, not hand-checked. The comparison below is read from each company’s own profile.

4 of 12 capabilitiesShared product type

4 of 12 capabilities — Shares agent orchestration, agentic coding, code generation and 1 more.

Ludbee capability tags · from the product records

Shared product type — Both ship AI agent, API service, application and 1 more.

Ludbee product records

Aligned comparison

FieldStepFunVercel
Valuation$10B$9.3B Vercel has 7.0% less
Employees—915
Founded20232015 8 yrs earlier
StatusPrivatePrivate match
CategoryFoundation ModelsApplication
Stack layerAI agent, API service, Application, Developer tool, Model APIAI agent, API service, Application, Developer tool
HeadquartersShanghai, ChinaSan Francisco, USA

Capability overlap

Shared · 4

Agent orchestrationAgentic codingCode generationModel inference

Not verified for Vercel · 8

Image generationKnowledge retrievalSpeech to textText generationText to speechVoice agentSearch answersWorkflow automation

Recorded for StepFun. Vercel’s product records say nothing either way — a missing record is not a missing capability.

Not verified for StepFun · 3

Evaluation and observabilityModel hostingThreat detection and response

Recorded for Vercel. StepFun’s product records say nothing either way — a missing record is not a missing capability.

Products, side by side

Algorithmic pairing — assembled from recorded fields, not hand-checked

StepFun

Application

阶跃AI (StepFun AI)Application

StepFun's consumer AI assistant, available on the web and as Windows and macOS desktop clients, offering web search, knowledge-base Q&A, image creation, tool use and speech recognition.

API service

Step PlanAPI service

A subscription service from the StepFun Open Platform that supplies a monthly Credit pool for calling StepFun's flagship models from third-party coding tools and agent clients such as Claude Code, Cursor, OpenClaw, Cline and Zed.

AI agent

StepClawAI agent

A one-click cloud-deployed AI agent offered inside the 阶跃AI assistant that interprets instructions and carries out tasks autonomously.

Developer tool

阶跃星辰 AI Studio (StepFun AI Studio)Developer tool

A browser-based workspace for building, testing and deploying AI applications on StepFun's models, with a playground, a showcase library of example apps and a personal asset library.

Vercel

Application

v0Application

Generates working user interfaces and full-stack app code from a written prompt or an existing design reference.

API service

Vercel AI GatewayAPI service

A single endpoint for hundreds of AI models, handling API keys, rate limits and failover on the caller's behalf.

AI agent

Vercel AgentAI agent

Investigates production issues and reviews code, with Tasks, Recipes and a Software Factory workflow.

Developer tool

Vercel BotIDDeveloper tool

Detects automated abuse of web and AI endpoints; free Basic mode, paid Deep Analysis for Pro and Enterprise plans.

Vercel ConnectDeveloper tool

Manages authenticated connections for AI agents.

Vercel SandboxDeveloper tool

Runs agent-generated code in isolated microVMs.

No counterpart

StepFun sells these in a stack layer with no product recorded for Vercel yet — nothing on the other side to compare them against.

Model API

StepFun Open PlatformModel API

API access to StepFun's text, vision, speech and image models, with credit packages and enterprise plans.

Open in the browser view