[HN Gopher] Series C and scale
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Series C and scale
Author : fidotron
Score : 87 points
Date : 2025-06-06 17:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cursor.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cursor.com)
| gsibble wrote:
| Impressive. Didn't they just raise a bunch recently?
| thomasdziedzic wrote:
| Their series B was in January:
| https://www.cursor.com/blog/series-b
| gsibble wrote:
| Wow. That's an insane difference in only a few months.
| bix6 wrote:
| Wow only a 21.6x rev multiple. The others a month ago were 75x
| for windsurf acquisition by OpenAI and a 45x on cursors $200M
| raise at $9B val.
|
| Separately, has anyone gotten through to cursor support? They
| sent me a welcome email asking for feedback but when I responded
| nobody answered back.
|
| Edit: added old financing info.
| gsibble wrote:
| They probably aren't wanting for cash so I wonder why they did
| this. Maybe a lot of it was secondary sales?
| electroly wrote:
| On the contrary, they are lighting piles of cash on fire.
| Their unlimited slow pool is bleeding them dry.
| aduffy wrote:
| And let's not forget PLTR still hovering just over 100x revenue
| multiple.
| hamburglar wrote:
| Re: support, no luck for me either. I even responded to a
| personal message I got from someone about a glitch with my
| signup and never heard back. I have no idea if I'm actually
| paying them.
| bix6 wrote:
| "Please don't hesitate to reach out if there's anything we
| could do to improve Cursor for you. Making Cursor phenomenal
| for our pro users is our number one priority.
|
| Best, The Cursor Devs "
|
| :(
| cauliflower2718 wrote:
| I've gotten an AI generated email back when I asked for
| support, which did seem to understand my request at a surface
| level, but was not actually helpful. That's the extent of
| support I've received from cursor.
| hamburglar wrote:
| I assume this is our future for almost all support for every
| product and service.
| bionsystem wrote:
| Whether it's this or call centers, at the end of the day...
| adwn wrote:
| _$900 million_?! That 's an absolutely insane amount of money.
| How much of this will go into building the product itself, and
| how much into converting cash to marketshare? And they raised
| $100 million not even 5 months ago. Have they already burned
| through that pile of money?
|
| I mean, their product is good - I'm using and paying for Cursor -
| but not _fantastic_. And there 's a lot of competition. And the
| switching cost is relatively low.
| bananapub wrote:
| they are approximately a service for transferring revenue from
| paying users to Microsoft or Anthropic, with a small software
| development project alongside - why would that seem like an
| insane amount of money?
| gsibble wrote:
| I'm wondering if some was used to purchase shares of employees
| and founders.
| drx wrote:
| I thought it was a pretty interesting choice to post the funding
| announcement as the team and not as the CEO, more companies
| should probably do that.
| naiv wrote:
| so enough for them to build their own model
| a13n wrote:
| I predict that in 6-12 months we'll all be back on VS Code. I
| would hate to have Microsoft as a direct competitor, especially
| in a space they care so much about (developers + AI).
| gsibble wrote:
| Agreed. There's no way Cursor can stay ahead when they really
| don't have much of a moat.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I love Cursor but is seems Microsoft could
| just rip it all off and put it in base VS Code.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Which they have basically done and are closing in on them
| fast
| yunwal wrote:
| You and I have not tried the same vscode
| electroly wrote:
| Their main supplier (Anthropic) is also a direct competitor
| (Claude Code). I love Cursor but boy, what a tough place to be
| in. It's hard to see how it works out for them in the end.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| Code isn't as strictly competitive as the IDE's are. Code
| even has solid VS Code integration. It's effectively a
| plugin, just one that isn't tied to any one IDE.
| fizx wrote:
| Cursor+Gemini MAX is pretty good these days. It seems like
| Claude Code and C+GM leapfrog each other every month or two.
|
| Cursor has a lot of potential leverage owning the developer
| and the training data streams and commoditizing the
| underlying model.
| autoconfig wrote:
| This thesis has existed since Cursor first started, and the gap
| between them and VSCode has only widened since then. It's worth
| spending some time thinking about why that may be before having
| such strong conviction about their demise.
| roxolotl wrote:
| What are your thoughts on why it might be?
| mritchie712 wrote:
| * a small, focused team moves faster
|
| * cursor has great taste and that's hard to replicate at MS
| scale
|
| * Microsoft had allegiance to OpenAI early on which reduced
| their experimentation with other models
| rched wrote:
| > the gap between them and VSCode has only widened since then
|
| What is in this gap? Do you know of any good resources that
| outline the features that Cursor provides over VSCode with
| Copilot?
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| have you tried using either of them?
| yunwal wrote:
| You can't really name a list of features that cursor has
| that copilot doesn't. It's more like: Cursor appears to
| heavily dogfood their features, VSCode's copilot seems to
| check the feature boxes, but each one sucks to use. The
| autocomplete popups are jarring. The copilot agent doesn't
| seem to gather the correct context. They still haven't
| figured out tool calling. It's really something you have to
| try rather than look at a checklist of features.
| tough wrote:
| I think your knowledge is a bit outdated? Cursor
| definetley still has an edge, but VSCode Github Copilot
| UI has come a long way and using the same underlying
| models for both the results are fairly similar and change
| only in ux niceties
|
| stuff like background agents cursor is way ahead.
|
| Zed Editor is a nice contender too
| yunwal wrote:
| I tried copilot agent like 3 weeks ago. If that much has
| changed since then, props to Microsoft.
|
| Zed is very nice, it's just a totally different workflow.
| I think people who work in a domain where AI is not
| particularly strong would be better off with Zed, since
| Cursor's way of reviewing edits is a little clumsy.
| 9rx wrote:
| What about on the speed front? VS Code's biggest problem
| is with how slow it is. I'd already be done and on to the
| next (and maybe the next thing after that) by the time it
| finally gets around to things. I like the concept, but I
| only have so much time in a day.
| runako wrote:
| If you find VS Code to be slow, you might give Zed a try.
| I have been using Zed with my Claude API key and it's
| really something.
| subarctic wrote:
| You mean the gap in vscode compatibility?
| written-beyond wrote:
| Yeah idk what "gap" every cursor user talks about. I
| installed cursor, it didn't work on wsl closed that chapter
| asap. Went to windsurf, enjoyed it but it's credit usage
| scheme was very confusing, nearly pressed the buy button
| until I went back to try copilot.
|
| Copilot is good enough, even the free tier gets whatever
| annoying tasks I don't want to do done. Anything more
| complex I already have a Gemini and ChatGPT subscription so
| I just do the old copy paste.
| ta988 wrote:
| Have you used copilot recently? It is absolutely useless these
| days.
| nikcub wrote:
| The new memory feature on Cursor is going to keep me locked in
| for the foreseeable future. It's _really_ good.
| iamsaitam wrote:
| It's very weird that they use their blog to post about this
| instead of all the feature they've been adding.
| aduffy wrote:
| That's quite a war chest to raise in such a short period of time.
| The market has concentrated with the couple of recent
| acquisitions. Sounds like likely uses of that cash are
|
| - Buy a few million more users with more generous free tier, as
| models get cheaper the cost to acquire the marginal customer goes
| down over time anyway
|
| - Build your own foundation model for coding. tbh I'm skeptical
| that a company can do this better than the Big 3 AI cos.
|
| - Go to war over enterprise. Do a deal with Deloitte/Accenture
| and get every single one of their consultants spending 8hrs a day
| in Cursor. Another flavor: compete head-on with Accenture by
| making your own service firm that undercuts them and delivers
| ahead of schedule for once.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Go to war over enterprise ... consultants spending 8hrs a
| day in Cursor._
|
| And students. Sun's Java push, especially its proliferation as
| "object-oriented programming language" in CS courses world-
| wide, might offer a lesson or two.
| aduffy wrote:
| Students aren't a market though. Sun and Java was really just
| marketing to future users
| raspasov wrote:
| Future market?
| aduffy wrote:
| Java only became Java because of enterprise. Getting
| students to use it was just an exercise in soft power.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Why do you think enterprise loves it so much?
| VectorLock wrote:
| Inertia.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| Isn't marketing basically spending money now that will
| result in revenue later?
| luckz wrote:
| > Build your own foundation model for coding. tbh I'm skeptical
| that a company can do this better than the Big 3 AI cos.
|
| They already have their own "tab" model which might not be a
| very large one but definitely better than most open weight
| models on short code snippet completion. And for larger agentic
| LLMs, they can totally start from a pre-trained base model
| (e.g. deepseek R1) and only do post-train/RL/finetune, which is
| doable with a small team and their cash reserve. It's not hard
| to imagine a good base model (probably deepseek V4?) + cursor's
| user data leads to a model that surpass sonnet/gemini on coding
| tasks only.
| blitzar wrote:
| > Deloitte/Accenture and get every single one of their
| consultants spending 8hrs a day in Cursor
|
| Unless you change Cursor into a busy work assistant it is
| functionally useless for consultants.
| spacecadet wrote:
| Work in consulting. The entire industry has flipped on its
| head as rates(interest and consulting) have collapsed. Most
| of the non-techie and somewhat-but-dangerous people(those of
| us left...) are now spending most of their time vibe coding
| demos and early prototypes.
| dhdodnzjsjs wrote:
| > Work in consulting
|
| What is it with western white collar (tech) workers and not
| using first person pronouns? This sentence took me a couple
| tries before I realized the "I" was missing.
|
| I see it a lot on this site as well as my own company.
| Spivak wrote:
| I don't think it's a tech thing, this is a pretty common
| form in english like "Went to the store. Got some
| butter."
|
| I think it might feel more common in tech because it's
| more common in digital communications.
| spacecadet wrote:
| Did you create the account just to post this?
| andrethegiant wrote:
| Too busy rolling in money to actually write a substantial
| announcement?
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Since Codex web ui came out I stopped using Cursor and just
| direct pull requests on Codex web interface. I love it so much, I
| belive most people will move to this kind of development as
| models are getting stronger, and the whole agent+user workflow
| will switch to pull request based development.
|
| It's not like I'm not using Cursor at all, it just became the
| 10-20% of my workflow compared to almost 100% before.
| archeantus wrote:
| Can you elaborate more on this? You're using a web ide? And you
| love it?
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Sure, chatgpt.com/codex
| bahmboo wrote:
| I use Roo Code. I love it. Are Cursor or Copilot or any of the
| other "front ends" so much better? I guess it's up to me to find
| out but wonder what others have found. [edit: grammar]
| moralestapia wrote:
| 2 million paying users?
|
| Idk, hard to believe.
|
| Wow.
| pwm wrote:
| I'm assuming a lot is coming from companies where there's fomo
| that if you don't use the latest and greatest tooling, your
| competitors will and you'll be left behind.
| habosa wrote:
| Ok so OpenAI owns Windsurf now, so I would expect them to cut
| Cursor off from the really good stuff at some point. Anthropic
| has Claude Code, they could do the same. Google is a little
| farther behind but they do have an AI Studio thing that could be
| viewed as competitive.
|
| Feels like Cursor has to make their own models to guarantee long-
| term survival? Especially if they're not going for an acquisition
| (reports are they turned down OpenAI). Can they make a model
| that's good enough for a world where OpenAI / Anthropic / Google
| all cut them off?
| mythz wrote:
| Good to see with that war chest they'll be competing in this
| space for some time yet - which we'll need more of to keep the
| pricing down (aka subsidized).
|
| Never tried Cursor since I'm not prepared to leave my IDEs, but
| still got a full AI toolbox with augmentcode.com, GitHub Copilot,
| Claude Code and Gemini Code Assist enabled in both my primary VS
| Code and Rider IDEs.
| justmarc wrote:
| I have a feeling we're getting into an "AI squeeze" soon. So many
| companies in this sphere are going to have to fight for their
| lives and or implode.
| stonecharioteer wrote:
| I don't understand funding whatsoever. How does a company go from
| Series B to C in 5 months?
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(page generated 2025-06-07 23:02 UTC)