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And people say there's no AI bubble... I wonder what Cursor's market value is at this point. Definitey north of $10B right? Their founders and investors would

by paxys 2y ago

And people say there's no AI bubble... I wonder what Cursor's market value is at this point. Definitey north of $10B right? Their founders and investors would be wise to exit while the AI market is still hot (and the rest is not).

jennaxyz 2y ago
Why not? If it captures enterprise IDE market, it's definitely worthy of the valuation implying the future growth potential. Jetbrains is valued at 7B
eightysixfour 2y ago
I’m putting most of my energy into AI these days but I don’t know anyone who doesn’t think there is a bubble, but an overvaluation early doesn’t mean the value isn’t there and won’t come later (see .com crash).
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
spaceywilly 2y ago
To play devils advocate, software engineering is currently proving to be a hugely valuable use case for AI, and will almost certainly grow over time. I’m not sure what the market cap for software engineering tooling is, but I assume $5B or even $10B would only represent a tiny fraction of the TAM. Here is one report that projects a $25B market by 2030. It would not take long to recoup their investment if that prediction comes true. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/03/26/3049705/28124/en/Artificial-Intelligence-Code-Tools-Research-Report-2025-Global-Market-to-Surpass-25-Billion-by-2030-Demand-for-Low-Code-No-Code-Platforms-Spurs-Adoption.html https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/03/26/304970...
- paxys 2y ago
  The software engineering market is one thing, but these editors are all basically VS Code + custom theme + calls to ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini. Useful, sure, but worth $5-10B each? Without users, revenue or even a brand?
  - dogma1138 2y ago
    The value right now is learning which prompts work, which strategies work, what is the sweet spot in terms of model size, is it better to run a model that costs 10 times more per token vs smaller inferior models that might need have 3 attempts at it, what are the best RAG and other enrichment strategies etc. You can only really get that when you have a large market share. When your IDE makes a call to OpenAI they get to see only half the picture they don’t know how the user reacts to the output. So there is a lot of value in being in the client loop also and seeing the full picture.
    - paxys 2y ago
      You know who else has that data, that too for free? OpenAI.
      - dogma1138 2y ago
        OpenAI only sees half the picture, that’s why they want to be in the IDE also so they can get all the usage metrics from the user viewpoint.
- nivertech 2y ago
  > Here is one report that projects a $25B market by 2030 My guess it's much larger than $25B This is no longer a market for software tooling, it's started to eat the software engineering salaries, freelancer marketplaces and consulting/outsourcing/bodyshop revenues... If there are ~ 30M developers now globally, earning $100K/yr on average, and this will reduce it to 20M, so we get 10M * $100K = $1T Even assuming that 90% will go to foundational models, not IDEs / coding agents SW, we still get ~ $100B

by paxys 2y ago

jennaxyz 2y ago

Why not? If it captures enterprise IDE market, it's definitely worthy of the valuation implying the future growth potential. Jetbrains is valued at 7B

eightysixfour 2y ago

I’m putting most of my energy into AI these days but I don’t know anyone who doesn’t think there is a bubble, but an overvaluation early doesn’t mean the value isn’t there and won’t come later (see .com crash).

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

spaceywilly 2y ago

To play devils advocate, software engineering is currently proving to be a hugely valuable use case for AI, and will almost certainly grow over time. I’m not sure what the market cap for software engineering tooling is, but I assume $5B or even $10B would only represent a tiny fraction of the TAM. Here is one report that projects a $25B market by 2030. It would not take long to recoup their investment if that prediction comes true. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/03/26/3049705/28124/en/Artificial-Intelligence-Code-Tools-Research-Report-2025-Global-Market-to-Surpass-25-Billion-by-2030-Demand-for-Low-Code-No-Code-Platforms-Spurs-Adoption.html https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/03/26/304970...

paxys 2y ago
The software engineering market is one thing, but these editors are all basically VS Code + custom theme + calls to ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini. Useful, sure, but worth $5-10B each? Without users, revenue or even a brand?
- dogma1138 2y ago
  The value right now is learning which prompts work, which strategies work, what is the sweet spot in terms of model size, is it better to run a model that costs 10 times more per token vs smaller inferior models that might need have 3 attempts at it, what are the best RAG and other enrichment strategies etc. You can only really get that when you have a large market share. When your IDE makes a call to OpenAI they get to see only half the picture they don’t know how the user reacts to the output. So there is a lot of value in being in the client loop also and seeing the full picture.
  - paxys 2y ago
    You know who else has that data, that too for free? OpenAI.
    - dogma1138 2y ago
      OpenAI only sees half the picture, that’s why they want to be in the IDE also so they can get all the usage metrics from the user viewpoint.
nivertech 2y ago
> Here is one report that projects a $25B market by 2030 My guess it's much larger than $25B This is no longer a market for software tooling, it's started to eat the software engineering salaries, freelancer marketplaces and consulting/outsourcing/bodyshop revenues... If there are ~ 30M developers now globally, earning $100K/yr on average, and this will reduce it to 20M, so we get 10M * $100K = $1T Even assuming that 90% will go to foundational models, not IDEs / coding agents SW, we still get ~ $100B