When news broke that Openai was in discussions to acquire AI coding company Windsurf for $3 billion, one of the first questions about the minds of those chasing the space was, “Why not buy cursor creator Anysphere instead?”
After all, the Openai Startup Fund has been an investor in Anysphere, the maker of cursors since the rapidly growing coding assistant seed round in late 2023 (Anysphere is often mentioned in its product name Cursor. The talks have failed. Instead, Anysphere is in talks to raise capital at a valuation of around $10 billion last month.
Openai, which will move on to acquiring discussions with another coding assistant manufacturer, shows how important it has become for ChatGpt manufacturers to capture slices of the code generation market. Windsurf generates approximately $40 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), reported by TechCrunch in February. Meanwhile, Anysphere’s cursors reportedly earn around $200 million on an ARR basis.
The Openai Codex CLI “agent,” which the company released on Wednesday, can also write and edit code, but attempts to buy Windsurf suggest that the CLI doesn’t want to wait for it to gain traction with its customers.
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