Cursor, an artificial intelligence startup that develops code completion tools, recently raised $60 million in Series A funding.
Original title: "Engineers at OpenAI and Midjourney are using the startup's AI-coded software valued at $400 million"
In a recent video posted on X, Cloudflare VP Ricky ·· Faraday Robinett, 8-year-old daughter of Ricky Robinett, shows how to build a chatbot that answers questions in the style of Harry Potter. All she had to do was type a text prompt into an AI-coded tool called Cursor, and it would generate a text box that said "Chat with Harry" to show the previous conversation with the chatbot, and then change the background design.
"If it really does, it would be cool," she said eagerly, as she waited for Cursor's AI to add a rotating lightning rod icon below the text box. In a matter of seconds, the AI tool completed her instructions.
The young novice programmer wasn't just drawn to Cursor's code editing and autocomplete tools. Engineers at leading AI startups like OpenAI, Midjourney, Perplexity, and Scale AI, as well as tech companies like Shopify and Instacart, are among the 30,000 customers who pay $20 or $40 a month to write and edit entire blocks of code using Cursor's AI tools.
Cursor was founded in 2022 by four friends who met at MIT. The company announced a few months ago that it had raised $60 million in a Series A funding round led by ·Andreessen Horowitz and with participation from Thrive Capital, OpenAI Startup Fund and Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean· the company announced. With the new investment, the startup is now valued at $400 million and has annual recurring revenue of more than $10 million, according to people familiar with the deal.
Cursor's funding comes as investors have poured millions of dollars into the increasingly crowded market for AI coding. Some companies, such as Cognitive Labs, valued at $2 billion, have launched AI-powered software engineers with the goal of completing entire engineering tasks without any human assistance, while others, such as Codeium, valued at $500 million, have built systems capable of processing large amounts of code at the same time.
But ·Miles Grimshaw, a partner at Thrive Capital, said that most of these AI-coding startups are building "add-ons" on top of existing applications used by developers, rather than creating new interfaces that are better suited to AI-related tasks, such as training models.
This is where Cursor comes into play. The company is developing a new type of "code editor" — an application where engineers can write and tweak code, or as Cursor CEO Michael · Trull puts it, "a programmer's Google Docs." The code editor combines AI models built on top of large language models such as OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude to automatically predict, write, and edit parts of the code.
As of now, Cursor's software has been widely adopted by engineers at AI startups. For example, Shyamal Anadkat, an ·engineer at OpenAI, said he uses Cursor to fix bugs and build prototypes. In an interview with Forbes, Anad Carter also spoke about the difficulty of creating new apps, saying, "This is a revolutionary technology to overcome the cold start problem. ”
Trull and his co-founders have been closely following OpenAI's progress in artificial intelligence since before ChatGPT was launched in 2020. As a result, Trull said, they know the space is gaining momentum. After witnessing the success of Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, they came up with the idea of creating an AI coding startup, as Microsoft's Copilot was an early sign of automating complex tasks as AI models improved. "GitHub Copilot is the first truly useful AI product," he told Forbes. "It's not something ethereal, and it's not something that you have to wait a long time to achieve."
Eventually, Cursor wanted to develop a tool that could automate 95% of the tedious work engineers do, allowing them to spend more time on the creative side of coding.
"I think it's very quick for individual engineers to be able to build much more complex systems than the current strong teams can make," he said. ”
This article is translated from
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2024/08/22/engineers-at-openai-and-midjourney-are-using-this-400-million-startups-ai-coding-software/
文:Rashi Srivastava
Translation: Vivian
Forbes China exclusive manuscript, please do not reprint without permission
Header image source: Getty Images
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