Anysphere is a startup building what it describes as an “AI-specific” software development environment called Cursor. The startup announced that it has raised $8 million in seed funding led by OpenAI Startup Fund with participation from GitHub CEO and Dropbox co-founder Nat Friedman. Anysphere co-founder and CEO Michael Truell stated that the new money, which brings Anysphere’s total to $11 million, will go towards hiring and supporting Anysphere’s AI and machine learning research.
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Anysphere
When people think of ‘AI plus coding’, their minds often go to AI-powered autocomplete. We think this is done particularly well by GitHub Copilot and others. That’s why we’re focussing on features that come after autocomplete, such as finding and fixing bugs and codebase Q&A. The ceiling in the AI coding space is so high, there’s so much to do, that you can’t just copy the technology and then get great sales. You have to constantly improve the technology. There are over 26 million developers worldwide, and there’s a huge market for people who really want an AI-specific experience.
Sanger, co-founder of Anysphere
Truell met Anysphere’s other co-founders, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger, while at MIT, where they became close friends. The four shared the goal of creating an integrated development environment (IDE) that could accelerate common programming and software creation tasks, such as debugging. For this purpose, Cursor, an offshoot of Microsoft’s open source code editor VS Code, brings together AI-powered tools designed to help developers write and ask questions about code.
Meanwhile, Truell claims Anysphere is slowly growing in popularity, with tens of thousands of people on the platform and a “rapidly growing” paying customer base. Annual recurring revenue is already over $1 million. That’s an auspicious start for a company that is about a year old.