$1M to $100M ARR in a year.

In a market filled with inflated valuations and shattered hopes, an AI startup that proves real-world value and achieves profitability becomes a rare gem.

Meet Cursor — the not-so-little engine that could, and actually left me speechless.

Cursor is an AI code editor developed by Anysphere. In short, it’s your smart coding BFF helping you debug code as you create it or even edit the codebase following your natural-language commands. It’s built as a fork of VS Code, meaning it looks exactly the same but adds an AI-driven cherry on top.

$8M in seed funding from the OpenAI Startup Fund in 2023

$100M raised in Series B in December 2024

$2.6B post-money valuation

$100M ARR reached in 12 months with 40K active users.

Rumor has it that Cursor is currently in talks for a new round, and a shocking $10B valuation is on the table. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI, Jeff Dean, and the founders of Stripe, among many others.

But it’s not just about returning the investment.

Cursor is shaking up the programming landscape with its revolutionary autocomplete feature, Tab. By analyzing what you’re writing in real time, it suggests the code to add next without the need to prompt it, making developers faster, sharper, and maybe even a little lazier (in the best way possible).

As amazed as I am with Cursor AI's success, I couldn’t help but wonder: are tools like it democratizing software engineering, or are they just making developers overly reliant on AI systems?