The fast-rising A.I. coding startup is redefining how engineers write and ship software across Silicon Valley.
Cursor, an A.I. coding tool praised by tech leaders from Nvidia's Jensen Huang to Google's Sundar Pichai, has quickly become indispensable for engineers across Silicon Valley. Investors are taking notice, too: the startup announced today (Nov. 13) that it has raised a new Series D round valuing it at an astonishing $29.3 billion.
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The figure represents a nearly threefold jump from Cursor's $9.9 billion valuation after raising $900 million in June, underscoring the meteoric rise of so-called "vibe coding," a term used to describe A.I.-assisted programming. The San Francisco-based startup's latest $2.3 billion round was co-led by Accel and Coatue, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia and Google.
Founded in 2023 by MIT graduates Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, Aman Sanger and Michael Truell (who serves as CEO), Cursor builds tools that help programmers write and edit code through autocomplete and intelligent assistance. Its clients include companies such as OpenAI, Uber, and even Major League Baseball (MLB).
The rise of Cursor has helped popularize "vibe coding," a term coined earlier this year by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy to describe a state where programmers "fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials and forget that the code even exists." According to Karpathy, such a phenomenon is possible because coding models are "getting too good," as he said in a viral post on X.
Cursor's capabilities have earned it high-profile endorsements. Nvidia's Jensen Huang called it his "favorite enterprise A.I. service" during an October appearance on CNBC's Squawk Box, revealing that nearly all of Nvidia's 40,000 engineers use Cursor's tools. Pichai has also praised the company, noting that he has personally experimented with vibe coding through its tools.
Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna, said on a recent episode of the Sourcery podcast that he has become so absorbed in using Cursor that he often codes late into the night -- much to his family's annoyance.
The company's rapid adoption has fueled equally rapid internal growth. Cursor now employs more than 300 engineers, researchers, designers and operators. The company plans to expand further, according to a blog post today. The startup has surpassed $1 billion in annualized revenue and now generates more code than "almost any other LLMs in the world," it said.
Competitors like Anthropic and OpenAI -- which reportedly considered acquiring Cursor earlier this year -- have also released coding tools to capitalize on the vibe coding boom. Cursor is pushing deeper into model development with Composer, its own coding model released in October. Much of the company's new funding will go toward improving Composer, CEO Michael Truell told the Wall Street Journal.
"Internally, we often talk about how high the ceiling is for how great Cursor can become, and how much work still remains to get there," the company wrote in today's blog post. "This funding will allow us to invest deeply in our research and build Cursor's next magical moments."