Anysphere, the maker of AI coding assistant Dear Cursor, isn’t thinking about an IPO anytime soon, its co-founder and CEO Michael Truell said he said on stage Monday at Fortune’s AI Brainstorming conference.
After he arrived $1 billion in annual revenue in November and raising $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation last month, Truell said his company is focused on building more features.
For example, he noted that Cursor’s domestic LLMs were geared towards supporting specific products. Cursor also confirmed the existence of these models in November when it reported: “Our internal models now generate more code than almost any other LLM in the world.”
His comments about the models came when the founder was asked how he plans to compete with the LLM makers he relies on when the majors — OpenAI, Anthropic — have their own AI coding offerings.
Truell likened coding products to “a concept car,” while his product is a production car.
“It would be like taking an engine and a concept car around it instead of a whole end-to-end car that was built,” Truell said. “What we do is we get the best intelligence the market has to offer from many different providers. And we also build our own product-specific models in parts. We take it, build it together and integrate it, then we also build the best tool and finish the UX for working with AI.”
Cursor’s reliance on competitors — and its need to build its own LLMs — has been the subject of speculation among VCs in Silicon Valley since earlier this year, when OpenAI reportedly considered Anysphere as an acquisition target. Anysphere rejected the idea. (This was around the same time Windsurf’s OpenAI deal also fell through, with the founder eventually joining Google.)
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The issue, investors told TechCrunch, was that AI coders were losing money thanks to the high fees they paid model builders. In Cursor’s case, instead of selling, it adapted pricing to a usage model in July, passing the API fees charged by model builders directly to its users. This change from an all-in subscription (and the large surprise bills that some customers faced) caused an uproar among some of its users.
On Monday, when asked about pricing, Truell said, “When we started Cursor, you would turn to Cursor for a quick JavaScript query, and now you’re turning to Cursor to do hours of work for you. So the pricing model has had to change for us and others in the space. That means we’re moving more toward a consumption model,” he said.
Truell added that one of the tools the company is working on is cost management tools similar to cloud computing, which allow businesses to monitor their overall usage and track the bills their engineers are running.
“We have a whole team internally dedicated to business engineering and building things like spend controls and billing teams and visibility,” he said.
In addition, he said Cursor is focusing on two key areas for the coming year. One is to handle more complex agent functions.
“We want you to take end-to-end tasks, the ones that are concise to specify, but then really hard to do, and do them entirely from the Runner. An example is a bug fix,” Truell explained.
He particularly wants Cursor to be able to fix the kinds of bugs that might be easy to describe but take “weeks of someone’s time, thousands of code runs” to handle. “We want Cursor to do that, end-to-end,” he said.
The other area he named, but didn’t elaborate on, was the idea of ”thinking about groups as the individual unit we serve,” he said. This should be in contrast to serving individual coders and an indication of how well his business is doing.
In addition to cost-tracking functions, Truell said he wants Cursor to handle more parts of the software development lifecycle outside of writing code. He pointed to Cursor’s code review product as an example, which he said is used by some customers to analyze every pull request, whether it’s written by AI or a human. (A pull request is when a developer submits code for review before it’s merged into the main project.)
“So you’ll see us start helping teams more as a whole,” with more features like this, he promised.
Meanwhile, major competitors are also gearing up for the world of complex task agents. Amazon just released a coding tool that promises it can work for days already.
Just this week, AI power players including Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, AWS and many otherslaunched a new consortium under the Linux Foundation to develop open source agent interoperability standards. They even contributed to some of their key projects, such as Anthropic’s wildly popular Model Content Protocol (MCP).
His plans for the year probably won’t put Anysphere firmly ahead of Cursor’s main model-making competitors. They should, however, keep company in the match.
