Anysphere, the company that makes AI coding assistant darling Cursor, isn’t thinking about an IPO any time soon, its co-founder CEO Michael Truell said on stage Monday at Fortune’s AI Brainstorming conference.
After reaching $1 billion in annualized revenue in November, and raising $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation last month, Truell said his company is instead focused on building out more features.
For instance, he noted that Cursor’s home-grown LLMs were geared to support specific products. Cursor also confirmed the existance of those models in November when it touted, “Our in-house models now generate more code than almost any other LLMs in the world.”
His comments about the models came up when the founder was asked how he plans to compete with the LLM makers that he relies on when the major ones — OpenAI, Anthropic — have their own AI coding offerings.
Truell likened their coding products to “a concept car” whereas his product is a production automobile.
“It would be like taking an engine and a concept car around it instead of a whole end-to-end car that was manufactured,” Truell said. “What we do is we take the best intelligence that the market has to offer from many different providers. And we also do our own product-specific models in places. We take that, we build it together and integrate it then also build the best tool and end UX for working with AI.”
Cursor’s dependence on its competitors — and its need to build its own LLMs — has been a subject of speculation among VCs in Silicon Valley since earlier this year when OpenAI reportedly looked at Anysphere as an acquisition target. Anysphere turned the idea down. (This was around the same time that Windsurf’s OpenAI deal also didn’t materialize, with the founder eventually joining Google).
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The issue, investors told TechCrunch, was that AI coding editors were losing money thanks to high costs they paid to the model makers. In Cursor’s case, instead of selling, it adjusted pricing to a usage model in July, directly passing along the API fees that model makers charge to its users. This change from an all-inclusive subscription fee (and the surprise big bills some customers faced) caused an uproar among some of its users.
On Monday, when asked about the pricing kerfuffle, Truell said, “When we started Cursor, you would turn to Cursor for a quick JavaScript question and now you’re turning to it to do hours of work for you. So the pricing model had to shift for us and others in the space. That means shifting more towards a consumption model,” he said.
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