I dream of roombas: 1000s of automated AI robots that autonomously maintain code (ghuntley.com)

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 · 7h 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.

aduffy · 6h ago

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

SmellTheGlove · 2h ago

Isn’t marketing basically spending money now that will result in revenue later?

raspasov · 5h ago

Future market?

aduffy · 2h ago

Java only became Java because of enterprise. Getting students to use it was just an exercise in soft power.

solarkraft · 52m ago

Why do you think enterprise loves it so much?

bix6 · 9h 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.

cauliflower2718 · 6h 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.

hamburglar · 26m ago

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

aduffy · 8h ago

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

gsibble · 9h ago

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

electroly · 9h ago

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

hamburglar · 7h 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.

bix6 · 7h 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 ”

a13n · 9h 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).

autoconfig · 8h 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.

rched · 7h 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?

yunwal · 6h ago

You can't really name a list of features that cursor has that copilot doesn't. It's more like: Cursor appears to heavily dogfood their features, VSCode's copilot seems to check the feature boxes, but each one sucks to use. The autocomplete popups are jarring. The copilot agent doesn't seem to gather the correct context. They still haven't figured out tool calling. It's really something you have to try rather than look at a checklist of features.

9rx · 6h ago

What about on the speed front? VS Code's biggest problem is with how slow it is. I'd already be done and on to the next (and maybe the next thing after that) by the time it finally gets around to things. I like the concept, but I only have so much time in a day.

runako · 4h ago

If you find VS Code to be slow, you might give Zed a try. I have been using Zed with my Claude API key and it's really something.

tough · 6h ago

I think your knowledge is a bit outdated? Cursor definetley still has an edge, but VSCode Github Copilot UI has come a long way and using the same underlying models for both the results are fairly similar and change only in ux niceties

stuff like background agents cursor is way ahead.

Zed Editor is a nice contender too

keeganpoppen · 7h ago

have you tried using either of them?

subarctic · 7h ago

You mean the gap in vscode compatibility?

roxolotl · 7h ago

What are your thoughts on why it might be?

mritchie712 · 7h ago

* a small, focused team moves faster

* cursor has great taste and that's hard to replicate at MS scale

* Microsoft had allegiance to OpenAI early on which reduced their experimentation with other models

electroly · 9h 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.

fizx · 8h 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.

throwaway314155 · 8h 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.

nikcub · 3h ago

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

gsibble · 9h 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 · 7h ago

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

yunwal · 6h ago

You and I have not tried the same vscode

ta988 · 5h ago

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

habosa · 1h 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?

bahmboo · 1h 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]

xiphias2 · 4h 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.

andrethegiant · 5h ago

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

naiv · 9h ago

so enough for them to build their own model

adwn · 9h 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.

gsibble · 9h ago

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

bananapub · 9h 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?

moralestapia · 1h ago

2 million paying users?

Idk, hard to believe.

Wow.

gsibble · 9h ago

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

thomasdziedzic · 9h ago

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

gsibble · 9h ago

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

drx · 9h 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.

iamsaitam · 8h ago

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