FilterHN

8 hours ago

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That's quite a war chest to raise in such a short period of time. The market has concentrated with the couple of recent acquisitions. Sounds like likely uses of that cash are

- Buy a few million more users with more generous free tier, as models get cheaper the cost to acquire the marginal customer goes down over time anyway

- Build your own foundation model for coding. tbh I'm skeptical that a company can do this better than the Big 3 AI cos.

- Go to war over enterprise. Do a deal with Deloitte/Accenture and get every single one of their consultants spending 8hrs a day in Cursor. Another flavor: compete head-on with Accenture by making your own service firm that undercuts them and delivers ahead of schedule for once.

ignoramous

7 hours ago

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> Go to war over enterprise ... consultants spending 8hrs a day in Cursor.

And students. Sun's Java push, especially its proliferation as "object-oriented programming language" in CS courses world-wide, might offer a lesson or two.

6 hours ago

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Students aren’t a market though. Sun and Java was really just marketing to future users

SmellTheGlove

2 hours ago

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Isn’t marketing basically spending money now that will result in revenue later?

raspasov

5 hours ago

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Future market?

2 hours ago

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Java only became Java because of enterprise. Getting students to use it was just an exercise in soft power.

solarkraft

1 hour ago

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Why do you think enterprise loves it so much?

bix6

9 hours ago

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Wow only a 21.6x rev multiple. The others a month ago were 75x for windsurf acquisition by OpenAI and a 45x on cursors $200M raise at $9B val.

Separately, has anyone gotten through to cursor support? They sent me a welcome email asking for feedback but when I responded nobody answered back.

Edit: added old financing info.

cauliflower2718

6 hours ago

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I've gotten an AI generated email back when I asked for support, which did seem to understand my request at a surface level, but was not actually helpful. That's the extent of support I've received from cursor.

hamburglar

40 minutes ago

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I assume this is our future for almost all support for every product and service.

8 hours ago

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And let's not forget PLTR still hovering just over 100x revenue multiple.

9 hours ago

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They probably aren't wanting for cash so I wonder why they did this. Maybe a lot of it was secondary sales?

electroly

9 hours ago

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On the contrary, they are lighting piles of cash on fire. Their unlimited slow pool is bleeding them dry.

hamburglar

7 hours ago

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Re: support, no luck for me either. I even responded to a personal message I got from someone about a glitch with my signup and never heard back. I have no idea if I’m actually paying them.

bix6

7 hours ago

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“Please don't hesitate to reach out if there's anything we could do to improve Cursor for you. Making Cursor phenomenal for our pro users is our number one priority.

Best, The Cursor Devs ”

a13n

9 hours ago

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I predict that in 6-12 months we'll all be back on VS Code. I would hate to have Microsoft as a direct competitor, especially in a space they care so much about (developers + AI).

autoconfig

8 hours ago

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This thesis has existed since Cursor first started, and the gap between them and VSCode has only widened since then. It’s worth spending some time thinking about why that may be before having such strong conviction about their demise.

rched

8 hours ago

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> the gap between them and VSCode has only widened since then

What is in this gap? Do you know of any good resources that outline the features that Cursor provides over VSCode with Copilot?

yunwal

6 hours ago

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You can't really name a list of features that cursor has that copilot doesn't. It's more like: Cursor appears to heavily dogfood their features, VSCode's copilot seems to check the feature boxes, but each one sucks to use. The autocomplete popups are jarring. The copilot agent doesn't seem to gather the correct context. They still haven't figured out tool calling. It's really something you have to try rather than look at a checklist of features.

9rx

6 hours ago

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What about on the speed front? VS Code's biggest problem is with how slow it is. I'd already be done and on to the next (and maybe the next thing after that) by the time it finally gets around to things. I like the concept, but I only have so much time in a day.

runako

4 hours ago

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If you find VS Code to be slow, you might give Zed a try. I have been using Zed with my Claude API key and it's really something.

tough

6 hours ago

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I think your knowledge is a bit outdated? Cursor definetley still has an edge, but VSCode Github Copilot UI has come a long way and using the same underlying models for both the results are fairly similar and change only in ux niceties

stuff like background agents cursor is way ahead.

Zed Editor is a nice contender too

keeganpoppen

7 hours ago

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have you tried using either of them?

subarctic

7 hours ago

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You mean the gap in vscode compatibility?

roxolotl

8 hours ago

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What are your thoughts on why it might be?

mritchie712

8 hours ago

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* a small, focused team moves faster

* cursor has great taste and that's hard to replicate at MS scale

* Microsoft had allegiance to OpenAI early on which reduced their experimentation with other models

electroly

9 hours ago

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Their main supplier (Anthropic) is also a direct competitor (Claude Code). I love Cursor but boy, what a tough place to be in. It's hard to see how it works out for them in the end.

fizx

8 hours ago

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Cursor+Gemini MAX is pretty good these days. It seems like Claude Code and C+GM leapfrog each other every month or two.

Cursor has a lot of potential leverage owning the developer and the training data streams and commoditizing the underlying model.

throwaway314155

8 hours ago

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Code isn't as strictly competitive as the IDE's are. Code even has solid VS Code integration. It's effectively a plugin, just one that isn't tied to any one IDE.

nikcub

3 hours ago

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The new memory feature on Cursor is going to keep me locked in for the foreseeable future. It's _really_ good.

9 hours ago

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Agreed. There's no way Cursor can stay ahead when they really don't have much of a moat.

Don't get me wrong, I love Cursor but is seems Microsoft could just rip it all off and put it in base VS Code.

outside1234

8 hours ago

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Which they have basically done and are closing in on them fast

yunwal

6 hours ago

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You and I have not tried the same vscode

ta988

5 hours ago

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Have you used copilot recently? It is absolutely useless these days.

habosa

1 hour ago

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Ok so OpenAI owns Windsurf now, so I would expect them to cut Cursor off from the really good stuff at some point. Anthropic has Claude Code, they could do the same. Google is a little farther behind but they do have an AI Studio thing that could be viewed as competitive.

Feels like Cursor has to make their own models to guarantee long-term survival? Especially if they’re not going for an acquisition (reports are they turned down OpenAI). Can they make a model that’s good enough for a world where OpenAI / Anthropic / Google all cut them off?

bahmboo

2 hours ago

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I use Roo Code. I love it. Are Cursor or Copilot or any of the other "front ends" so much better? I guess it's up to me to find out but wonder what others have found. [edit: grammar]

xiphias2

5 hours ago

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Since Codex web ui came out I stopped using Cursor and just direct pull requests on Codex web interface. I love it so much, I belive most people will move to this kind of development as models are getting stronger, and the whole agent+user workflow will switch to pull request based development.

It’s not like I’m not using Cursor at all, it just became the 10-20% of my workflow compared to almost 100% before.

andrethegiant

5 hours ago

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Too busy rolling in money to actually write a substantial announcement?

naiv

9 hours ago

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so enough for them to build their own model

adwn

9 hours ago

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$900 million?! That's an absolutely insane amount of money. How much of this will go into building the product itself, and how much into converting cash to marketshare? And they raised $100 million not even 5 months ago. Have they already burned through that pile of money?

I mean, their product is good – I'm using and paying for Cursor – but not fantastic. And there's a lot of competition. And the switching cost is relatively low.

9 hours ago

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I'm wondering if some was used to purchase shares of employees and founders.

bananapub

9 hours ago

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they are approximately a service for transferring revenue from paying users to Microsoft or Anthropic, with a small software development project alongside - why would that seem like an insane amount of money?

moralestapia

2 hours ago

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2 million paying users?

Idk, hard to believe.

Wow.