Startup Breakdown: Cursor AI
Auto-complete for developers
A startup I hear about quite frequently from engineers is Cursor AI, formally called Anysphere. I am not an investor but love to research companies, and this is an output of some of my work. There is not much yet written about Cursor - but I have pieced together what’s available about the company online so far. All of this information is pulled from publicly available resources.
The one article that’s written about Cursor is in TechCrunch in October 2023 when they announced their $8M Seed round ($11M total raised) led by OpenAI. The company, technically called Anysphere, was founded by 4 friends from MIT. Michael is the CEO and has been working on the company for 2.5 years.
One of Cursor’s competitors is Codeium, which recently raised a $65M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins.
Cursor recently presented at an AI Engineering conference and the video is available below. Cursor is essentially an auto-complete for code with a goal to make developers faster and more productive. It is a fork of VS Code.
Cursor talks about some of the hard problems that they have solved with a very small team. They work in-person in North Beach, San Francisco, and their career page is here.
As far as product reviews, I found a comprehensive review online performed by an engineer who scores Cursor as one of the best, rating it 8.5 out of 10 compared to 6/10 for Codium. More details here.
Overall, Cursor looks to be a company on a strong growth trajectory that is tackling a hard problem in a big market. If they can continue to be one of the preferred tools for developers and show how they increase developer productivity, I imagine they have a bright future ahead.