Cursor’s AI assistant, launched in 2023, helps programmers write and debug code more efficiently. It’s become one of the fastest-growing startups of all time and a central player in tech’s “vibe coding” era, as demand surges among software developers for artificial intelligence coding tools.
The discussions are preliminary and may not result in a funding deal, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.
Cursor declined to comment.
Cursor has attracted financing from top names in venture capital and the tech industry, including Coatue, Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz as well as Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Nvidia Corp.
Its last haul, a $2.3 billion round announced in November, boosted the startup’s valuation to $29.3 billion. The company’s annualized revenue topped $2 billion in February.
Cursor’s biggest rival is Anthropic, which has been accelerating its enterprise coding business Claude Code. Anthropic recently closed a $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion valuation.
Competition among AI coding startups is heating up as Anthropic rakes in more funding and large players like OpenAI, which released a major update to its coding model Codex earlier this month, step up their game. Replit, Lovable and Cognition have each clinched their own fundraises in the hundreds of millions at unicorn valuations in recent months.