ANYSPHERE

Anysphere came out of MIT. Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger were classmates who bonded over how much better coding could get with AI.

They started the company in 2022. Their bet was that the code editor itself should be built around AI from the ground up, not bolted on later.

So they forked a popular open editor and rebuilt it into Cursor. Then AI coding exploded and Cursor turned out to be one of the best versions of it.

Cursor is a code editor that writes and fixes code for you. A developer describes what they want in plain English and the AI does the typing.

Anysphere makes money the simple way, through subscriptions. Individual developers pay around $20 a month.

Companies pay more per seat for team features and heavier usage. The tool is so useful to people who code that they happily pay for it out of pocket, which is a big reason revenue grew so fast.

There is really one product, and it is Cursor. Cursor is an AI-first code editor that can write new code, edit what you already have, and answer questions about your whole project.

Its standout feature is letting you make changes across many files just by describing them. Under the hood it uses top models from OpenAI and Anthropic plus Anysphere's own tuning.

One product, done extremely well, is the whole company.

Cursor grew by word of mouth among developers, the hardest crowd to fool. The product was just good, and engineers told other engineers.

It also rode the wave of ever-better AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic, plugging the newest ones straight into the editor. That let a small team deliver something that felt like magic without training giant models themselves.

It hit $100 million in annual revenue at record speed. Let the developers do the marketing.

Anysphere's biggest risk is that it does not own the engine. Cursor runs on models from OpenAI and Anthropic, and those same companies build their own coding tools.

If a model maker decides to compete hard, Anysphere is caught in the middle. There is also a crowd of rivals like GitHub Copilot chasing the same developers.

Being the best AI editor today does not guarantee being the best one next year.

Thrive Capital is the star backer here, joining nearly every round. In August 2024 Andreessen Horowitz led a $60 million Series A at a $400 million valuation.

Just four months later Thrive led a $105 million round that valued Anysphere at $2.5 billion. Then in June 2025 Thrive led a massive $900 million round at a $9.9 billion valuation, with Accel, a16z, and DST Global piling in.

Three rounds in under a year. That is what $500 million in revenue does.