Series C and scale

https://www.cursor.com/en/blog/series-c

by fidotron • 1 year ago

94 70 1 year ago

cursor.com

gsibble5• 1 year ago

Impressive. Didn't they just raise a bunch recently?

thomasdziedzic• 1 year ago

Their series B was in January: https://www.cursor.com/blog/series-b

gsibble5• 1 year ago

Wow. That's an insane difference in only a few months.

bix62• 1 year ago

Wow only a 21.6x rev multiple. The others a month ago were 75x for windsurf acquisition by OpenAI and a 45x on cursors $200M raise at $9B val.

Separately, has anyone gotten through to cursor support? They sent me a welcome email asking for feedback but when I responded nobody answered back.

Edit: added old financing info.

gsibble5• 1 year ago

They probably aren't wanting for cash so I wonder why they did this. Maybe a lot of it was secondary sales?

electroly2• 1 year ago

On the contrary, they are lighting piles of cash on fire. Their unlimited slow pool is bleeding them dry.

aduffy4• 1 year ago

And let's not forget PLTR still hovering just over 100x revenue multiple.

hamburglar2• 1 year ago

Re: support, no luck for me either. I even responded to a personal message I got from someone about a glitch with my signup and never heard back. I have no idea if I’m actually paying them.

bix62• 1 year ago

“Please don't hesitate to reach out if there's anything we could do to improve Cursor for you. Making Cursor phenomenal for our pro users is our number one priority.

Best, The Cursor Devs ”

cauliflower2718• 1 year ago

I've gotten an AI generated email back when I asked for support, which did seem to understand my request at a surface level, but was not actually helpful. That's the extent of support I've received from cursor.

hamburglar2• 1 year ago

I assume this is our future for almost all support for every product and service.

adwn• 1 year ago

$900 million?! That's an absolutely insane amount of money. How much of this will go into building the product itself, and how much into converting cash to marketshare? And they raised $100 million not even 5 months ago. Have they already burned through that pile of money?

I mean, their product is good – I'm using and paying for Cursor – but not fantastic. And there's a lot of competition. And the switching cost is relatively low.

bananapub• 1 year ago

they are approximately a service for transferring revenue from paying users to Microsoft or Anthropic, with a small software development project alongside - why would that seem like an insane amount of money?

gsibble5• 1 year ago

I'm wondering if some was used to purchase shares of employees and founders.

drx• 1 year ago

I thought it was a pretty interesting choice to post the funding announcement as the team and not as the CEO, more companies should probably do that.

naiv• 1 year ago

so enough for them to build their own model

a13n• 1 year ago

I predict that in 6-12 months we'll all be back on VS Code. I would hate to have Microsoft as a direct competitor, especially in a space they care so much about (developers + AI).

gsibble5• 1 year ago

Agreed. There's no way Cursor can stay ahead when they really don't have much of a moat.

Don't get me wrong, I love Cursor but is seems Microsoft could just rip it all off and put it in base VS Code.

outside1234• 1 year ago

Which they have basically done and are closing in on them fast

electroly2• 1 year ago

Their main supplier (Anthropic) is also a direct competitor (Claude Code). I love Cursor but boy, what a tough place to be in. It's hard to see how it works out for them in the end.

throwaway314155• 1 year ago

Code isn't as strictly competitive as the IDE's are. Code even has solid VS Code integration. It's effectively a plugin, just one that isn't tied to any one IDE.

fizx• 1 year ago

Cursor+Gemini MAX is pretty good these days. It seems like Claude Code and C+GM leapfrog each other every month or two.

Cursor has a lot of potential leverage owning the developer and the training data streams and commoditizing the underlying model.

autoconfig• 1 year ago

This thesis has existed since Cursor first started, and the gap between them and VSCode has only widened since then. It’s worth spending some time thinking about why that may be before having such strong conviction about their demise.

roxolotl• 1 year ago

What are your thoughts on why it might be?

rched• 1 year ago

the gap between them and VSCode has only widened since then

What is in this gap? Do you know of any good resources that outline the features that Cursor provides over VSCode with Copilot?

subarctic• 1 year ago

You mean the gap in vscode compatibility?

ta988• 1 year ago

Have you used copilot recently? It is absolutely useless these days.

nikcub• 1 year ago

The new memory feature on Cursor is going to keep me locked in for the foreseeable future. It's _really_ good.

iamsaitam• 1 year ago

It's very weird that they use their blog to post about this instead of all the feature they've been adding.

aduffy4• 1 year ago

That's quite a war chest to raise in such a short period of time. The market has concentrated with the couple of recent acquisitions. Sounds like likely uses of that cash are

- Buy a few million more users with more generous free tier, as models get cheaper the cost to acquire the marginal customer goes down over time anyway

- Build your own foundation model for coding. tbh I'm skeptical that a company can do this better than the Big 3 AI cos.

- Go to war over enterprise. Do a deal with Deloitte/Accenture and get every single one of their consultants spending 8hrs a day in Cursor. Another flavor: compete head-on with Accenture by making your own service firm that undercuts them and delivers ahead of schedule for once.

ignoramous• 1 year ago

Go to war over enterprise ... consultants spending 8hrs a day in Cursor.

And students. Sun's Java push, especially its proliferation as "object-oriented programming language" in CS courses world-wide, might offer a lesson or two.

aduffy4• 1 year ago

Students aren’t a market though. Sun and Java was really just marketing to future users

luckz• 1 year ago

Build your own foundation model for coding. tbh I'm skeptical that a company can do this better than the Big 3 AI cos.

They already have their own "tab" model which might not be a very large one but definitely better than most open weight models on short code snippet completion. And for larger agentic LLMs, they can totally start from a pre-trained base model (e.g. deepseek R1) and only do post-train/RL/finetune, which is doable with a small team and their cash reserve. It's not hard to imagine a good base model (probably deepseek V4?) + cursor's user data leads to a model that surpass sonnet/gemini on coding tasks only.

blitzar2• 1 year ago

Deloitte/Accenture and get every single one of their consultants spending 8hrs a day in Cursor

Unless you change Cursor into a busy work assistant it is functionally useless for consultants.

spacecadet3• 1 year ago

Work in consulting. The entire industry has flipped on its head as rates(interest and consulting) have collapsed. Most of the non-techie and somewhat-but-dangerous people(those of us left...) are now spending most of their time vibe coding demos and early prototypes.

andrethegiant• 1 year ago

Too busy rolling in money to actually write a substantial announcement?

xiphias22• 1 year ago

Since Codex web ui came out I stopped using Cursor and just direct pull requests on Codex web interface. I love it so much, I belive most people will move to this kind of development as models are getting stronger, and the whole agent+user workflow will switch to pull request based development.

It’s not like I’m not using Cursor at all, it just became the 10-20% of my workflow compared to almost 100% before.

archeantus• 1 year ago

Can you elaborate more on this? You’re using a web ide? And you love it?

xiphias22• 1 year ago

Sure, chatgpt.com/codex

bahmboo• 1 year ago

I use Roo Code. I love it. Are Cursor or Copilot or any of the other "front ends" so much better? I guess it's up to me to find out but wonder what others have found. [edit: grammar]

KronisLV• 1 year ago

Another user of Roo Code here, I really like that I could hook it up to either OpenRouter or Anthropic/Google directly, for different use cases - for the most part I enjoy using Claude, but when their rate limits hit (e.g. when I needed to shuffle around ~100k tokens for a specific use case) then Gemini was also good enough!

Plus, it's a plugin for VSC, so I don't need an entirely new editor, which I think makes a lot of sense when you don't want to overhaul UI but just add a few features here and there (autocomplete, chat, ability to edit files and some UI for agentic work with checkpoints along the way etc.).

I'm actually not sure why Roo/Cline aren't way more popular, rather than Cursor etc.

moralestapia• 1 year ago

2 million paying users?

Idk, hard to believe.

Wow.

pwm• 1 year ago

I'm assuming a lot is coming from companies where there's fomo that if you don't use the latest and greatest tooling, your competitors will and you'll be left behind.

habosa• 1 year ago

Ok so OpenAI owns Windsurf now, so I would expect them to cut Cursor off from the really good stuff at some point. Anthropic has Claude Code, they could do the same. Google is a little farther behind but they do have an AI Studio thing that could be viewed as competitive.

Feels like Cursor has to make their own models to guarantee long-term survival? Especially if they’re not going for an acquisition (reports are they turned down OpenAI). Can they make a model that’s good enough for a world where OpenAI / Anthropic / Google all cut them off?

mythz• 1 year ago

Good to see with that war chest they'll be competing in this space for some time yet - which we'll need more of to keep the pricing down (aka subsidized).

Never tried Cursor since I'm not prepared to leave my IDEs, but still got a full AI toolbox with augmentcode.com, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code and Gemini Code Assist enabled in both my primary VS Code and Rider IDEs.

justmarc• 1 year ago

I have a feeling we're getting into an "AI squeeze" soon. So many companies in this sphere are going to have to fight for their lives and or implode.

stonecharioteer• 1 year ago

I don't understand funding whatsoever. How does a company go from Series B to C in 5 months?

Series C and scale

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