Cursor: Past, Present, and Future
Mood
skeptical
Sentiment
mixed
Category
tech
Key topics
AI coding
venture capital
software development
Cursor, an AI coding company, announced a $2.3B Series D funding round, sparking discussion about the company's valuation, business model, and the role of VC funding in the AI coding space.
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- 01Story posted
11/13/2025, 2:12:23 PM
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11/13/2025, 2:16:16 PM
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11/15/2025, 2:08:51 AM
4d ago
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And presumably they'll use the funding to build more than just a modified VSCode.
the framing here is more about "why would you start from random weights when perfectly good starting weights exist" https://www.latent.space/p/fastai
Composer-1 is very good for routine code edits.
Claude and Gemini get pulled in for hard problems and architecture.
cannot -> can
(the extra negative negated your point)
They're also royally screwed since the IDE is going to cease being the place this work is done soon. Your VCS and org chat will be the new IDE.
they may not have done a lot of this from scratch but there's still a lot of innovation in what they're doing. they're also building a pretty fantastic product and clearly the leader today in AI innovation for IDEs.
may not be everyone's cup of tea; but i think you might be detracting some of their innovation.
I'm wondering if AI coding companies almost NEED to be this capital heavy to pay for the massive LLM costs.
Of course you could also just spend your money wisely and not do another funding round, but then how are people supposed to know how much you are worth? And how are investors supposed to know they made a great investment?
> We’ve also crossed $1B in annualized revenue
A 30x revenue multiple on (presumably) relatively low-margin revenue is certainly punchy.
One wonders how much of their $1bn of ARR they're paying straight through to Claude/Anthropic.
$90m in employee expenses so that's neglible.
Prob burning through 200% of revenue which I've seen elsewhere. But they also probably spend a fair amount training their own model. I don't think it's foundation model. But it's pretty fair to assume that $1bn revenue is about $2bn to Anthropic/GPT/Grok
"Anysphere runs pretty lean with around 150 employees and has a single digit monthly cash burn, a source tells me."
I’m greedy to ask but is there a better alternative? Hard for me to imagine. I tried Copilot was no where near as good.
But you can also see quantitatively that Sourcegraph produces the most accepted code: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-catching-anth...
I've seen very little, meaningful difference. They all have their quirks, things their good at / bad at. The underlying models are very similar as well
I think what you are saying is true too but another angle is that people use these tools in different ways so they yield different results. Hell even the expectations are different. Someone prompting for some React components will much happier with Claude sonnet 4.5 than me. I do heavy GPU programming and scientific computing stuff where LLM will mostly give you hallucinating answers 80% of time.
But code review is really important to me and nothing comes close to Cursor in regards to reviewing the code the LLM generates. I can keep the good parts, modify or throw out the bad parts. I can go back to a checkpoint easily when things get really bad. What solution comes even close to that? Cursor nails this really well. Claude code acolytes tell me to just use git commands. Yeah, no thanks.
Vibe coding? Yes, no meaningful difference.
you lost me here because this is based on your opinion and impressions, not data. How do you know nothing comes close?
The PR experience you describe is available in several options and setups. Different strokes for different folks, your choice is not superior by any meaningful measure other than your own preferences
i guess people just don't try other tools often
Now Claude code and Cursor are the best options imo, and I would say Cursor takes the edge for ide integration. Claude, as a separate thing to the ide, does mean you can do now flexible things like run it in a script loop.
Copilot doesn't get a shout in. It's fine for autocomplete but as a full agent it doesn't seem there yet.
If you're paying for it yourself Cursor seems to give the most bang for buck as well.
For agentic coding, people tend to prefer Codex or Claude Code, but I haven't heard many opinions about Cursor's new Composer yet.
That last word, operators, I have seen used multiple times over the past couple of weeks to refer to managers and politicians. Is that the usage here too? If so, is this a new trend in the tech world? I’ve certainly heard of “political operators” in TV shows about Washington DC, but the usage in tech is new to me.
instead I propose to call VC's "non-operator characters" and see how they feel about that
How do they know how much code is generated by other LLMs outside Cursor?
Ha. Does anyone run a total on how much VC funding has gone towards this goal? In aggregate?
What does that mean? They got $2.3 billion of VC money and are now worth $30 billion?
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