Anysphere, maker of AI coding assistant Cursor, is growing so quickly that it\u2019s not in the market to be sold, even to OpenAI, a source close to the company tells TechCrunch.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been a hot target. Cursor is one of the most popular AI-powered coding tools, and its revenue has been growing astronomically \u2014 doubling on average every two months, according to another source. Anysphere\u2019s current average annual recurring revenue is about $300 million, according to the two sources.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The company previously walked away from early acquisition discussions with OpenAI, after the ChatGPT maker approached Cursor, the two sources close to the company confirmed, and CNBC previously reported<\/a>. Anysphere has also received other acquisition offers that the company didn\u2019t consider, according to one of these sources.\u00a0<\/p>\n Cursor turned down the offers because the startup wants to stay independent, said the two people close to the company. Instead, Anysphere has been in talks to raise capital at about a $10 billion valuation<\/a>, Bloomberg reported last month.\u00a0<\/p>\n Although it didn\u2019t nab Anysphere, OpenAI didn\u2019t give up on buying an established AI coding tool startup. OpenAI talked with more than 20 others, CNBC reported.<\/p>\n And then it got serious over the next-fastest-growing AI coding startup, Windsurf, with a $3 billion acquisition offer<\/a>, Bloomberg reported last week. While Windsurf is a comparatively smaller company, its ARR is about $100 million, up from $40 million in ARR<\/a> in February, according to a source.\u00a0<\/p>\n Windsurf has been gaining popularity with the developer community, too, and its coding product is designed to work with legacy enterprise systems. Windsurf did not respond to TechCrunch\u2019s request for comment. OpenAI declined to comment on its acquisition talks.\u00a0<\/p>\n OpenAI is likely shopping because it\u2019s looking for its next growth areas as competitors such as Google\u2019s Gemini and China\u2019s DeepSeek put pricing pressure on access to foundational models.\u00a0<\/p>\n Moreover, Anthropic<\/a> and Google have recently released AI models<\/a> that outperform OpenAI\u2019s models on coding benchmarks, increasingly making them a preferred choice for developers.<\/p>\n While OpenAI could build its own AI coding assistant, buying a product that is already popular with developers means the ChatGPT-maker wouldn\u2019t have to start from scratch to build this business.<\/p>\n VCs who invest in developer tool startups are certainly watching. Speculating about OpenAI\u2019s strategy, Chris Farmer, partner and CEO at SignalFire, told TechCrunch of the company, \u201cThey\u2019ll be acquisitive at the app layer. It\u2019s existential for them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anysphere, maker of AI coding assistant Cursor, is growing so quickly that it\u2019s not in the market to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42786,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,19807,1942,2915,6316,1318,53,16,15,23931],"class_list":["post-42785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-anysphere","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-exclusive","tag-mergers-and-acquisitions","tag-openai","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-windsurf"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114385154415825044","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}