The market for AI-powered coding assistants is fierce, but Cursor stands out due to its superior performance and impressive growth rate for its parent company, Anysphere. In just a few months, monthly revenue soared from $4 million to $4 million, attracting the attention of many venture investors and triggering a series of high-dollar acquisition offers.
In the current market, AI-driven coding assistant startups are emerging one after another, such as Augment, Codeium, Magic, and Poolside. However, Cursor became the most popular product among them. The annual revenue of its development company Anysphere was US$4 million in April this year. By last month, it had soared to US$4 million per month, growing much faster than other coding assistant providers.
Such rapid growth has attracted the attention of many venture investors. According to people familiar with the matter, Anysphere has recently received a series of undisclosed acquisition offers with a valuation of up to $2.5 billion, including Benchmark, Index Ventures, and previous investors Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive.
It is reported that Anysphere’s recent undisclosed offer was originally US$1.5 billion, but rose to US$2.5 billion in just one week. In addition, sources said that investors are generally willing to price the company at US$2.5 billion. This valuation is a huge jump from the $400 million valuation Anysphere held at the time of its funding round four months ago. At that time, the company successfully completed a $60 million Series A round of financing, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive, and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison also participated in the financing.
Anysphere was founded in 2022 by the founding team including Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanjay (Aman Sanger), both students at MIT. Last year, Anysphere graduated from OpenAI's accelerator program as one of its most prominent graduates. Since then, Anysphere has also received an $8 million seed round of financing led by OpenAI’s entrepreneurial fund, with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi ) also participated in the investment.
Today, many engineers are already using coding assistants like Cursor, and some venture investors predict that these tools may allow startups to hire fewer software developers in the future.
Anysphere’s success story, as well as the rapid rise of Cursor, heralds the huge potential of the AI coding assistant market. The editor of Downcodes believes that more similar innovative technologies will emerge in the future, changing the future of software development.