Anysphere, the company behind the AI code editor Cursor, is rewriting startup growth playbooks. Founded by four MIT grads just over two years ago, they've now hit a staggering $9 billion valuation in their latest round.
Anysphere/Cursor's extraordinary valuation growth trajectory
The journey includes an $8 million seed led by OpenAI in July 2023, followed by A16Z $60 million Series A at $400 million in Aug 2024.
With their revenue reportedly doubling in Q1 to $200M ARR and OpenAI's recent Windsurf purchase, we believe they could hit a $30B valuation by August 2025 — or a 75x jump in one year.
Lean Team, Massive Growth
Perhaps most remarkable? The team behind this hypergrowth has remained lean, with the four technical co-founders doing all the coding until a year ago and only growing to 30 to 60 now. They are the epitome of Product Led Growth, with their homepage still being a simple landing page.
And instead of forking Microsoft's VS Code like many competitors, they built their own AI-first code editor. Cursor is one of the new breed of AI-First "Vibe" Unicorns"—rewiring how we build, lead, and scale in the AI era.
"To help leaders and builders leverage this Vibe coding explosion, in the coming weeks, I am releasing a book, Riding the AI Tsunami and launching an accompanying newsletter, The Vibe Tribe. Please follow to stay posted."
