Anysphere raises $8M from OpenAI to build an AI-powered IDE
Summary
Anysphere, a startup building what it describes as an AI-native software development environment, called Cursor, today announced that it raised $8 million in seed funding led by OpenAIs Startup Fund with participation from former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi and other angel investors.The new cash, which brings Anyspheres total raised to $11 million, will be put toward hiring and supporting Anyspheres AI and machine learning research, co-founder and CEO Michael Truell said.In the next several years, our mission is to make programming an order of magnitude faster, more fun and creative, Truell told TechCrunch in an email interview. Our platform enables all developers to build software faster.Truell met Anyspheres other co-founders, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger, while at MIT, where they became close friends. We think this has been done particularly well by GitHub Copilot and others, so were focused on features that come after autocomplete, like finding and fixing bugs and codebase Q&A.Does Cursor have much hope of competing with the incumbents in the IDE space, though? In the coming months, the plan is to enable Cursor to make more complex edits across files and entire folders, improve at finding code and learn new libraries from documentation.In the meantime, Anyspheres popularity is slowly growing, Truell claims, with tens of thousands of people on the platform and a fast-growing paying customer base. Annual recurring revenue is already over $1 million an auspicious start for a roughly one-year-old company.For now, were focused on the individual and teams experience over Enterprise, Sanger said.