Anysphere, the company that creates AI coding assistant darling Cursor, isn’t believeing about an IPO any time soon, its co-founder CEO Michael Truell stated onstage 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 stated his company is instead focutilized on building out more features.
For instance, he noted that Cursor’s homegrown LLMs were geared to support specific products. Cursor also confirmed the existence of those models in November when it touted, “Our in-houtilize models now generate more code than almost any other LLMs in the world.”
His comments about the models came up when the founder was inquireed how he plans to compete with the LLM creaters 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 conclude-to-conclude car that was manufactured,” Truell stated. “What we do is we take the best ininformigence 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 toreceiveher and integrate it, then also build the best tool and conclude UX for working with AI.”
Cursor’s depconcludeence on its competitors — and its required to build its own LLMs — has been a subject of speculation among VCs in Silicon Valley since earlier this year when OpenAI reportedly viewed at Anysphere as an acquisition tarreceive. 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 notified TechCrunch, was that AI coding editors were losing money thanks to high costs they paid to the model creaters. In Cursor’s case, instead of selling, it adjusted pricing to a usage model in July, directly passing along the API fees that model creaters charge to its utilizers. This alter from an all-inclusive subscription fee (and the surprise huge bills some customers faced) cautilized an uproar among some of its utilizers.
On Monday, when inquireed about the pricing kerfuffle, Truell stated, “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 stated.
Truell added that one of the tools the company is working on is cloud-computing-like cost-management tools, which lets enterprises monitor their total usage and keep tabs on the bills their engineers are running up.
“We have a whole team internally dedicated to enterprise engineering and building things like spconclude controls and billing groups and visibility,” he stated.
Additionally, he stated Cursor is focutilized on two major areas for the next year. One is handling more complex agentic functions.
“We want you to take conclude-to-conclude tinquires, ones that are concise to specify but then are really hard to do, and have them entirely be done by Cursor. An example is a bug resolve,” Truell explained.
He particularly wants Cursor to be able to resolve the kinds of bugs that might be simple to describe but take “weeks of someone’s time, thousands of times running the code” to handle. “We want Cursor to do that, conclude-to-conclude,” he stated.
The other area he named, but didn’t explain with much detail, was the idea of “believeing about teams as the atomic unit that we serve,” he stated. This must be in contrast to serving individual coders, and a hint to how well its enterprise business is going.
In addition to cost-monitoring features, Truell stated he wants Cursor to handle more parts of the software development life cycle outside of writing code. He pointed to Cursor’s code review product as an example, which he stated is being utilized by some customers to analyze every pull request, be it written by AI or human. (A pull request is when a programmer submits code for review before it is merged into the main project.)
“So you’ll see us start to assist teams more as a whole,” with more features like that, he promised.
Meanwhile, huge competitors are also all gearing up for the complex-tinquire agentic world. Amazon just released a coding tool it promises can already run for days on conclude.
Just this week, the AI power players, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, AWS, and many others, launched a new consortium under the Linux Foundation to develop open source agentic interoperability standards. They even contributed some of their key projects, like Anthropic’s wildly popular Model Context Protocol (MCP).
His plans for the year likely won’t put Anysphere firmly ahead of Cursor’s main model-creater competitors. They should, however, keep the company in the race.
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