Background and Development
Cursor was developed by Anysphere Inc., a startup founded in 2022 by MIT graduates. In a short time:
- Secured a seed round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund worth $8 million (2023).
- Followed by a Series A round in 2024 worth $60 million, raising the valuation to $400 million.
- In 2025, a massive Series C funding round of $900 million boosted the valuation to around $9.9 billion.
Currently, the company has surpassed $500 million ARR (annual recurring revenue) and employs about 150 people.
Technical and Functional Features
- AI-integrated development environment: Built on Visual Studio Code but fully customized to leverage AI models like GPT, Claude, and xAI.
- Autocomplete: Cursor completes code and suggests entire functions based on the current context.
- Smart Rewrites: Modify entire sections of code at once, especially for restructuring or refactoring.
- Comprehensive codebase queries: Developers can ask interpretive questions in code, such as “Where is this function defined?”, with full context included.
- Natural language commands: For example, “Write a function to parse JSON” or “Update the settings file”, and the app executes as expected.
- Privacy and security: Offers a “privacy mode” that prevents code from being uploaded to the cloud and holds a SOC 2 certification.
User Feedback and Reviews
- Some developers described using Cursor as the closest thing to having a live programming partner inside the editor.
- An article from ByteByteGo highlights that Cursor provides a familiar environment with seamless AI integration, boosting developer effectiveness.
- A Business Insider report notes that major companies like Amazon and Google have begun adopting Cursor internally, despite having their own in-house tools, underscoring its leadership in the “vibe coding” tool market.
- In a recent interview, CEO Michael Truell explained that the core benefit of Cursor lies in increasing productivity and making coding easier, with a vision toward programming languages that better accommodate AI collaboration in the future.
