Anysphere

Anysphere is the company behind Cursor, an AI-native code editor that became one of the fastest-growing software products in history. By deeply integrating frontier models into the coding workflow — autocomplete, chat, and agentic multi-file edits — Cursor turned AI-assisted software development into a mainstream practice and made Anysphere one of the most valuable AI application startups.

Anysphere was founded in 2022 by MIT graduates and launched Cursor, a fork of the VS Code editor rebuilt around AI. Rather than bolting a chatbot onto an IDE, Cursor wove models into the core editing experience, from predictive multi-line edits to codebase-aware chat and autonomous agent modes.

Cursor's growth was extraordinary: it reached very high annualized revenue within a couple of years, driven by developers who found it materially faster than traditional editors. That success made Anysphere a marquee example of the "application layer" capturing value on top of foundation models, and one of the heaviest consumers of frontier model APIs.

Backed by top venture firms at a valuation in the tens of billions, Anysphere competes with GitHub Copilot, other AI editors, and coding agents from the labs themselves. Its dependence on frontier models — and its scale of usage — also make it a bellwether for the economics of AI coding tools and the models that power them.