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by s08148692 53 days ago
the IDE has little value

What they want is the massive user base, the data (Cursor has a lot of high quality coding data for training), the teams expertise in coding models and agents, and the Composer models

60 billion is a large number but these frontier labs are burning billions a month in compute alone, and SpaceX is IPOing soon so they'll have a lot of cash to spend

3 comments

This is it. I can’t believe the other commenters are unaware that Cursor recently fine-tuned an open-source model and brought it to the frontier, even if it remained there briefly.

Elon/xAI want Grok to become useful for coding. Cursor has enough data and expertise to create a useful coding model. They found a price and an arrangement that made sense for both parties.

>and the Composer models

You mean Kimi K2.5? They can get that for free.

How massive is the Cursor user base?
The numbers I could find says 1 million, with about 35% paying.

I'd say that a million users is pretty good, but 350.000 paying users isn't, if you're a $60B company. Someone else mentioned that Anysphere has a $1B ARR, but I seriously doubt that each user is forking over ~$3000 per year.

Over $2B ARR now.

Why do you doubt $3k/yr? Corporate usage skews a lot higher, when it's evaluated against hiring, not as a nice to have addon.

If $10k/yr means you get work done with one less hire that's an easy decision.

enterprise contracts. ARR is almost definitely juiced by counting future contract value