Anysphere, a rising star in the AI coding assistant space, and the startup behind Cursor, has announced a significant milestone—raising $60 million in a Series A funding round. The funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz, includes notable contributions from Google’s Jeff Dean, OpenAI’s John Schulman and Noam Brown, and the founders of Stripe and GitHub, among others.
Cursor has quickly become a fan favorite among independent developers, small businesses, and enterprises alike. With Cursor, they aim to transform coding by streamlining complex tasks—allowing developers to turn terse directives into working code, automate refactoring, and manage large-scale code changes in seconds. The company claims over 30,000 customers, including some of the world’s largest enterprises, research labs, and innovative startups.
Chris McKay
The company was founded in 2021 by MIT students Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger. This latest funding brings Anysphere’s total raise to over $71 million, following an $8 million seed round last September led by OpenAI.
Michael Truell, CEO of Anysphere, says, "Our mission is to create a magical tool that will one day write all the world's software." This ambitious goal places Anysphere in direct competition with established players like GitHub Copilot and a growing number of AI coding assistant startups like Cognition, Magic and Augment.
Cursor’s promise is to remove the “molasses” that often bogs down software development. According to Anysphere, their tool simplifies coding by offering instant answers, intelligent code rewrites, and bug detection, with the ultimate goal of transforming the way software is written. “Little by little,” they wrote, “the molasses that characterizes building and changing software is being replaced by lightness and control.”
To say the AI-coding space is hot right now, would be an understatement. Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, for example, has already garnered millions of paying users and is credited with driving a substantial portion of GitHub’s current growth. During a recent earnings call, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella highlighted that Copilot is “already larger than all of GitHub was when it was acquired.” Reports estimate that GitHub’s revenue reached $300 million at the time of Microsoft’s $7.5 billion acquisition in 2018.
Despite the crowded field, Anysphere believes their unique approach will differentiate Cursor from other AI coding tools.
Updated: In the previous version of this article, we incorrectly said Jeff Dean was employed at OpenAI. This has been corrected to reflect his current place of employment, Google.