Anysphere has announced that it has secured $8 million in seed funding to develop Cursor, its AI-powered integrated development environment (IDE) designed to boost programmer productivity.
The round was led by OpenAI's Startup Fund, with participation from GitHub former CEO Nat Friedman, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, and other angel investors. This brings Anysphere's total funding to $11 million since its 2021 founding.
Cursor aims to help developers write and debug code more efficiently by integrating OpenAI capabilities like code generation, documentation, and codebase searching. The IDE is a fork of Microsoft's open source Visual Studio Code editor.
Cursor's built-in AI assistant that can respond to natural language queries about code, surface potential bugs, and generate new code snippets on demand. For example, developers can ask "What service in VS Code lets me save a state to disk?" to pull up relevant documentation.
While Microsoft's Visual Studio Code dominates the IDE market, Anysphere believes its laser focus on AI-powered enhancements gives it an edge in accelerating developer workflows. However, with tech giants like Microsoft and Google, as well as the open source community, all racing to integrate AI into coding workflows, Anysphere faces steep competition.
The startup will need to rapidly iterate and prove the value of its "AI-native" approach in order to stand out. Outside of the popular GitHub Copilot, open source large language models like Code Llama, StarCoder, and Replit Code optimized for coding can already integrate with IDEs. Google also recently announced Project IDX, a web-based development environment with integrated AI, previews and emulators.
Though ambitious, Anysphere has its work cut out as it strives to build an IDE that can move the needle on productivity. The small team faces an increasingly crowded space filled with tech giants investing heavily in AI coding assistance. Time will tell if Anysphere's laser focus is enough for its IDE to gain traction.
Anysphere's $1 million in annual recurring revenue enables it to stay focused on individual developers and small teams for now. But its productivity-boosting AI tools may eventually prove attractive for larger enterprises as well.
With the new funding, Anysphere aims to refine Cursor's abilities to edit across multiple files, improve codebase comprehension, and learn new frameworks and libraries. By integrating OpenAI at the ground level, the startup aims to create a truly "AI-native" coding environment that can automate rote tasks and let developers focus on creativity.