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Cursor: Past, Present, and Future
- valliveeti 11mo agoCrazy for a 2.5 year old company
- VBprogrammer 11mo agoNothing to see here. Just your average 2.5 year old start-up worth nearly as much as Ford or VW.
- CactusBlue 11mo agoThey haven't built their own editor, they haven't built their own models; what have they actually built?
- garettmd 11mo agoI mean, they have built their own model: https://cursor.com/blog/composer https://cursor.com/blog/composer And presumably they'll use the funding to build more than just a modified VSCode.
- CactusBlue 11mo agomost likely a finetune of existing model
- SkyPuncher 11mo agoAs a user, I don't care. Composer-1 is very good for routine code edits. Claude and Gemini get pulled in for hard problems and architecture.
- viraptor 11mo agoIt's more than that. They have both their own completion model and now agentic one. It's not a basic fine-tune, because it's faster than anything else available out there, so there's something interesting in the architecture itself.
- swyx 11mo agoyeah its not fair to call it a finetune because finetune carries connotation of "there wasnt that much extra compute and data added". RLFT has a lot more added to it as Sasha alluded in his talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md8D8eNj5JM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md8D8eNj5JM - the x axis is log scale, think about that the framing here is more about "why would you start from random weights when perfectly good starting weights exist" https://www.latent.space/p/fastai https://www.latent.space/p/fastai
- kelvinjps10 11mo agoWhat they the money for?
- ManuelKiessling 11mo agoWell, they delivered something that is usable and useful for me and my team, and a lot of people I know, and I guess that’s what counts in business?
- koakuma-chan 11mo agoHave you tried Zed? Cursor is terribly slow and buggy.
- CactusBlue 11mo agoI barely use the autocomplete features of Cursor, and for agentic coding, Claude Code blows Cursor Agent out of the water. I don't think Cursor has anything that cannot be replicated in a week or two other than the first mover advantage; certainly not an advantage that cannot be justified at 30B+ valuation.
- chrisweekly 11mo ago"not an advantage that cannot be justified at 30B+ valuation" cannot -> can (the extra negative negated your point)
- camdenreslink 11mo agoThat is all well and good, but I think it's a fair question in terms of valuation. What is their moat other than momentum?
- CuriouslyC 11mo agoThey don't have one. People have been calling this out for a while. They're also royally screwed since the IDE is going to cease being the place this work is done soon. Your VCS and org chat will be the new IDE.
- tintor 11mo agoI've turned off Cursor's autocomplete. Every interaction with it feels like two steps forward and two steps back.
- lacker 11mo agoSomething people want, apparently!
- warmedcookie 11mo agoEveryone starts with some building blocks, some much bigger than others in Cursor's case.
- sorcercode 11mo agothey are building their own editor (granted they didn't do it from scratch); they do build their own models (see composer); they may not have done a lot of this from scratch but there's still a lot of innovation in what they're doing. they're also building a pretty fantastic product and clearly the leader today in AI innovation for IDEs. may not be everyone's cup of tea; but i think you might be detracting some of their innovation.
- FinnLobsien 11mo agoThe average series D is 50-100M. This is 2.3B. I'm wondering if AI coding companies almost NEED to be this capital heavy to pay for the massive LLM costs.
- tuhgdetzhh 11mo agoThey propably burn something in the order of 50M-100M per month in LLM API costs for models like Sonnet 4.5. So the answer would be: Yes.
- wongarsu 11mo agoBeing this capital heavy also "justifies" their valuations. New shares issued in each funding round are typically around 10% of total shares, so to get to a valuation of $30B you have to raise something around $3B Of course you could also just spend your money wisely and not do another funding round, but then how are people supposed to know how much you are worth? And how are investors supposed to know they made a great investment?
- nr378 11mo ago> Today, we’re pleased to announce a new round of financing: our Series D of $2.3B at a $29.3B post-money valuation. > We’ve also crossed $1B in annualized revenue A 30x revenue multiple on (presumably) relatively low-margin revenue is certainly punchy. One wonders how much of their $1bn of ARR they're paying straight through to Claude/Anthropic.
- bko 11mo ago300 employees, let's say average salary of 300k? $90m in employee expenses so that's neglible. Prob burning through 200% of revenue which I've seen elsewhere. But they also probably spend a fair amount training their own model. I don't think it's foundation model. But it's pretty fair to assume that $1bn revenue is about $2bn to Anthropic/GPT/Grok
- david38 11mo ago$300k most def too high
- gtowey 11mo agoDoubt it. Especially when you realize the cost to the company for an employee is much more than just take-home salary. Healthcare, employer payroll taxes & such all add up. You could also argue wether deferred comp like stock options & RSUs are calculated as the cost. The employee's "comp package" often comes in at 2x or more of their base salary.
- swyx 11mo agoits higher
- dcre 11mo agoThis article claimed they had single-digit monthly cash burn in August, when they had over $500M ARR (so let's say $41M monthly) and 150 employees. If that is true, they are spending way less than 200% of revenue. "Anysphere runs pretty lean with around 150 employees and has a single digit monthly cash burn, a source tells me." https://www.newcomer.co/p/cursors-popularity-has-come-at-a https://www.newcomer.co/p/cursors-popularity-has-come-at-a
- mentos 11mo agoI love Cursor. I’m greedy to ask but is there a better alternative? Hard for me to imagine. I tried Copilot was no where near as good.
- runekaagaard 11mo agoI like Claude Code in the terminal. For me it's so good it don't need IDE integration. I'm just using emacs and magit to navigate the code out of band.
- esalman 11mo agoI have both Cursor and VS code copilot in my work machine, but haven't really felt the need to use Cursor. VS code agent mode with Claude Sonnet is actually taking care of everything so far, plus I get to keep using my old launch config and debugging workflow.
- microdrum 11mo agoOf course, Sourcegraph is better.
- SatvikBeri 11mo agoWhat does Amp do better than Claude Code or Codex? I find the concept pretty appealing but the pricing is a bit scary.
- microdrum 11mo agoIt has better search and context management under the hood, which matters for big companies. But you can also see quantitatively that Sourcegraph produces the most accepted code: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-catching-anthropic-ai-coding https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-catching-anth...
- SatvikBeri 11mo agoWell, that's certainly something I care about. I'll give it a try, thanks!
- jebarker 11mo ago> We’ve grown to a team of over 300 engineers, researchers, designers, and operators That last word, operators, I have seen used multiple times over the past couple of weeks to refer to managers and politicians. Is that the usage here too? If so, is this a new trend in the tech world? I’ve certainly heard of “political operators” in TV shows about Washington DC, but the usage in tech is new to me.
- xvedejas 11mo agoI've only heard it used in tech when you have actual operations, in my experience that meant lab managers and technicians. I'm not sure what it is supposed to mean in this context.
- viraptor 11mo agoI believe in their case it means operations people as in sysadmins. Ops like in DevOps.
- bouk 11mo agoHR, finance, sales any non engineer is called an operator these days basically
- swyx 11mo agoi think its a bit of a VC lingo that i dislike seeing adopted by actual... operators. it casts the world into two: either you own a business, or you operate one. that makes it look like a 50-50 choice that is usually a valid option for a privileged few. also if the world actually looked like that then we'd have a lot less building going on and there are too many VCs already. instead I propose to call VC's "non-operator characters" and see how they feel about that
- sa46 11mo agoTrickle-down titles? I’m familiar with operator to refer to tier-1 special operations personnel like Seal Team 6 and Delta Force.
- ksajadi 11mo agoI am grateful to Cursor for ushering in the new age of coding beyond the "old" Github Copilot. I am also grateful to their VCs for subsidizing my coding. I am going to use their money to write subsidized code as long as the party lasts.
- para_parolu 11mo agoAs joke goes: capitalism is the best communism. I wonder how many interesting small projects were created as a side effect of cursor funding.
- rtaylorgarlock 11mo ago> Cursor should be a place where it’s impossible to write bugs. Ha. Does anyone run a total on how much VC funding has gone towards this goal? In aggregate?
- ThinkBeat 11mo ago"oday, we’re pleased to announce a new round of financing: our Series D of $2.3B at a $29.3B post-money valuation." What does that mean? They got $2.3 billion of VC money and are now worth $30 billion?
- nowflux 11mo ago"Our in-house models now generate more code than almost any other LLMs in the world" How do they know how much code is generated by other LLMs outside Cursor?
- swyx 11mo agocan pretty much triangulate across openrouter x feedback from the top 3 model labs to compare with internal usage and figure that out
- hashim-warren 11mo agoIt's a vanity metric. And if it had any basis in reality, they would have mentioned it in the sentence.