Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

https://cursor.com/blog/series-d

by whizusukite • 8 months ago

61 60 8 months ago

cursor.com

valliveeti• 8 months ago

Crazy for a 2.5 year old company

VBprogrammer• 8 months ago

Nothing to see here. Just your average 2.5 year old start-up worth nearly as much as Ford or VW.

CactusBlue3• 8 months ago

They haven't built their own editor, they haven't built their own models; what have they actually built?

garettmd• 8 months ago

I mean, they have built their own model: https://cursor.com/blog/composer

And presumably they'll use the funding to build more than just a modified VSCode.

CactusBlue3• 8 months ago

most likely a finetune of existing model

kelvinjps10• 8 months ago

What they the money for?

ManuelKiessling• 8 months ago

Well, 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• 8 months ago

Have you tried Zed? Cursor is terribly slow and buggy.

CactusBlue3• 8 months ago

I 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.

camdenreslink• 8 months ago

That is all well and good, but I think it's a fair question in terms of valuation. What is their moat other than momentum?

tintor• 8 months ago

I've turned off Cursor's autocomplete. Every interaction with it feels like two steps forward and two steps back.

lacker• 8 months ago

Something people want, apparently!

warmedcookie3• 8 months ago

Everyone starts with some building blocks, some much bigger than others in Cursor's case.

sorcercode• 8 months ago

they 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• 8 months ago

The 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• 8 months ago

They 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• 8 months ago

Being 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• 8 months 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• 8 months ago

300 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• 8 months ago

$300k most def too high

dcre• 8 months ago

This 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

swyx5• 8 months ago

fwiw the current going rate for frontier agent labs and model labs is 50x. 30x is actually a discount presumably for size. obviously that can go down, but if you avoided investing based on multiples you were an absolute fool for the last 3 years.

mentos• 8 months ago

I 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• 8 months ago

I 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• 8 months ago

I 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.

microdrum2• 8 months ago

Of course, Sourcegraph is better.

SatvikBeri3• 8 months ago

What does Amp do better than Claude Code or Codex? I find the concept pretty appealing but the pricing is a bit scary.

SatvikBeri3• 8 months ago

Cursor has the best tab-complete.

For agentic coding, people tend to prefer Codex or Claude Code, but I haven't heard many opinions about Cursor's new Composer yet.

verdverm4• 8 months ago

Comments like this remind me how much of the ai/agentic ecosystem is based on people's personal vibes and emotions

I've seen very little, meaningful difference. They all have their quirks, things their good at / bad at. The underlying models are very similar as well

elashri• 8 months ago

I think the problem is that it can be a full time job on itself to try to test all of the available alternatives. The models and editors, cli tools that aims for "increasing developer productivity using LLMs" comes and goes much faster than most people can even track.

I think what you are saying is true too but another angle is that people use these tools in different ways so they yield different results. Hell even the expectations are different. Someone prompting for some React components will much happier with Claude sonnet 4.5 than me. I do heavy GPU programming and scientific computing stuff where LLM will mostly give you hallucinating answers 80% of time.

warmedcookie3• 8 months ago

Okay, I'll delve deeper. You're talking about one thing, the models, which Cursor has a bunch available to choose from. Yes, I agree practically no difference there in terms of what junk is being spit out.

But code review is really important to me and nothing comes close to Cursor in regards to reviewing the code the LLM generates. I can keep the good parts, modify or throw out the bad parts. I can go back to a checkpoint easily when things get really bad. What solution comes even close to that? Cursor nails this really well. Claude code acolytes tell me to just use git commands. Yeah, no thanks.

Vibe coding? Yes, no meaningful difference.

jemmyw• 8 months ago

I've spent quite some time evaluating the different tools over the last year, for both working on my employers complex codebase, and for my personal projects. At the start of the year I found Cursor pretty unsatisfactory and unable to complete tasks. At the time I rated Cline+vscode as the best agent and experience.

Now Claude code and Cursor are the best options imo, and I would say Cursor takes the edge for ide integration. Claude, as a separate thing to the ide, does mean you can do now flexible things like run it in a script loop.

Copilot doesn't get a shout in. It's fine for autocomplete but as a full agent it doesn't seem there yet.

If you're paying for it yourself Cursor seems to give the most bang for buck as well.

jebarker• 8 months 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• 8 months ago

I'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.

viraptor2• 8 months ago

I believe in their case it means operations people as in sysadmins. Ops like in DevOps.

bouk• 8 months ago

HR, finance, sales any non engineer is called an operator these days basically

swyx5• 8 months ago

i 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• 8 months ago

Trickle-down titles? I’m familiar with operator to refer to tier-1 special operations personnel like Seal Team 6 and Delta Force.

ksajadi• 8 months ago

I 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• 8 months ago

As joke goes: capitalism is the best communism. I wonder how many interesting small projects were created as a side effect of cursor funding.

rtaylorgarlock• 8 months 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• 8 months 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• 8 months 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?

swyx5• 8 months ago

can pretty much triangulate across openrouter x feedback from the top 3 model labs to compare with internal usage and figure that out

hashim-warren• 8 months ago

It's a vanity metric. And if it had any basis in reality, they would have mentioned it in the sentence.

Cursor: Past, Present, and Future

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