AI coding startup Cursor once generated roughly 40–50% of Anthropic's revenue during its early growth phase, according to a Business Insider report citing a person familiar with the figures.
Cursor relied heavily on Anthropic's Claude models to power its coding products, while Anthropic benefited from the startup’s rapid adoption among developers and enterprises.
One employee cited by the report described the dynamic as both companies realising “they needed each other”, while also acknowledging that Anthropic was simultaneously developing a competing coding product.
Tensions increased after Anthropic launched Claude Code, which quickly gained traction among software developers.
According to the report, Anthropic executives had previously characterised the product internally to Cursor leaders as more of a research effort than a major commercial initiative.
Claude Code subsequently expanded into one of Anthropic's fastest-growing businesses, reaching a reported $2.5 billion annualised revenue run rate by February 2026, surpassing Cursor’s run rate at the time.
The relationship had already become a strategic concern for Cursor before Claude Code's launch. According to the report, executives were alarmed after Anthropic cut off rival coding startup Windsurf’s access to Claude Code during its acquisition talks with OpenAI, highlighting the risks of relying on a single AI provider.
The competitive threat reportedly triggered an internal response at Cursor. The report stated that CEO Michael Truell held an ‘emergency’ all-hands meeting in January and pushed the company to accelerate development of its own AI models to reduce reliance on external providers.
Cursor has since launched Composer, a family of coding-focused models that the company says it is increasingly developing in-house.
The report also noted that Cursor’s revenue later grew beyond $1 billion and reportedly doubled again in recent months, while the company now serves 60% of Fortune 500 firms and employs roughly 700 people.
Founded in 2022 by MIT graduates Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger, and Arvid Lunnemark, Cursor began as a standalone fork of Microsoft's VS Code editor before emerging as one of the fastest-growing AI software companies.
The startup crossed $1 billion in annualised revenue in 2025 and later launched its own Composer model family. The latest Composer 2.5 release has improved the model's standing on software engineering benchmarks, helping Cursor narrow the performance gap with frontier coding models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
Cursor’s growth has accelerated dramatically in 2026. According to Forbes, the company surpassed a $4 billion annualised revenue run rate in early June, up from roughly $2 billion in February, with about 75% of revenue now coming from enterprise customers.
Cursor has raised more than $2.8 billion to date. Its latest disclosed funding round was a $2.3 billion Series D in November 2025, which valued the company at $29.3 billion and was led by investors including Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Accel.
Cursor had reportedly been in discussions to raise approximately $2 billion at a valuation of around $50 billion in April. Those fundraising plans were effectively superseded by a partnership with SpaceX.
In April, Cursor partnered with xAI and SpaceX, gaining access to the Colossus AI supercomputer. The agreement includes a potential $60 billion acquisition option and billions of dollars in committed compute resources, according to public disclosures.
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