Anika Begay
Anysphere, a two-year-old startup that developed an AI-powered coding assistant called Cursor, has raised more than $60 million in a Series A round at a post-money valuation of $400 million, two sources familiar with the deal tell TechCrunch.
The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital. Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, also participated in the round.
Anysphere, a16z, and Collison did not respond to requests for comment. Thrive declined comment.
The company was co-founded by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger while they were students at MIT. Truell and Sanger later attended Neo Scholars, a prestigious mentorship program for undergraduates specializing in technical fields. Neo, which also runs an accelerator and venture fund, led Anysphere’s pre-seed investment. Last year, the company raised an $11 million seed round led by OpenAI Startup Fund with participation from former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, and other angel investors.
Anysphere is part of an increasingly crowded field of AI coding copilot startups. Other startups aiming to make writing software more efficient include Cognition, Poolside, Magic, and Augment, among others.
Investor interest in this space is no surprise. During his earnings call last month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that GitHub Copilot, an AI-powered tool that helps developers write code faster and more efficiently, “is already bigger than all of GitHub when it was acquired,” referring to its revenue. Reports estimate that GitHub’s revenue was $300 million when the tech giant agreed to buy the software development platform for $7.5 billion in 2018.
That means about 3 million developers worldwide pay Microsoft $100 a year (the annual cost of an individual GitHub subscription) to be more productive programmers, estimated a VC with an investment stake in one of the programming startups. “When you have that mountain of demand, you get a pretty competitive landscape,” he said.
Anysphere’s revenue and usage have also grown rapidly, one of the people said.
In July, Business Insider reported that Anysphere was in the process of raising a new round and was targeting a $400 million valuation.
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