The startup behind the viral AI coding app Cursor is snapping up high expertise from AI enterprise startups in a bid to bolster its competitors with Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot and win over companies trying to supercharge their staff with AI coding instruments.
In a single latest case, Cursor maker Anysphere struck a deal to amass the AI-powered buyer relationship administration (CRM) startup Koala, two sources aware of the matter advised TechCrunch.
As a part of the deal, Cursor will carry on a number of of Koala’s high engineers to construct out a devoted enterprise-readiness workforce. Nevertheless, your complete Koala workforce is not going to be becoming a member of Anysphere, and Cursor doesn’t plan to combine the startup’s core CRM product, a supply advised TechCrunch.
Koala plans to close down in September, the corporate mentioned in a weblog put up printed on Friday. The announcement comes simply 5 months after Koala raised a $15 million Sequence A led by CRV, with participation from HubSpot Ventures, Recall Capital and Afore. Koala was practically 4 years previous, had roughly 30 staff in keeping with LinkedIn, and had labored with purchasers corresponding to Vercel, Statsig, and Retool.
Sources on this story requested anonymity to talk with TechCrunch about personal issues. Koala and its founders didn’t reply to TechCrunch’s request for remark. Cursor declined to remark.
The Koala deal paints an image of the 2 varieties of AI startups we’re seeing in 2025. There’s Cursor, a juggernaut of an AI instrument that’s rising so quick it’s beginning to encroach on the AI house’s largest gamers, together with Microsoft and Anthropic. On the similar time, there’s a rising variety of startups like Koala: B2B AI startups that appeared promising — with a co-founder from Meta and advisors like Jack Altman — however have shortly run out of steam.
Cursor is capitalizing on this disparity, leveraging middling AI startups as a method to construct out its personal enterprise choices. Anysphere additionally just lately employed the CEO of cybersecurity startup Resourcely, Travis McPeak, to guide the corporate’s safety groups, in keeping with The Info.
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These offers look so much like Massive Tech’s reverse-acquihires, corresponding to Meta’s latest deal to rent Scale AI’s leaders. Very like in Meta and Scale’s deal, Cursor can now transfer shortly to construct out new enterprise segments whereas leaving questionable companies behind.
Cursor hopes that Koala and Resourcely’s expertise will assist it evolve from a private developer instrument that engineers quietly use at work and grow to be an enterprise‑vast platform that firms pay giant contracts to entry. Most enterprises right this moment that supply staff an AI instrument select Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, which works as an AI-powered extension to current built-in improvement environments (IDEs) corresponding to VS Code or JetBrains.
Cursor, which is a standalone AI-powered IDE, must beat out GitHub Copilot to strike offers in lots of instances, and it typically does in head-to-head exams. Nonetheless, Microsoft has the higher hand within the enterprise because of its long-standing relationships with legacy firms, in addition to its giant gross sales, safety, and help groups.
Within the final yr, Cursor has decisively constructed out its go-to-market and gross sales workforce — which now accommodates dozens of staff. A number of Cursor staff now spend their days visiting the places of work of Fortune 500 firms and displaying them how they’ll combine Cursor’s AI instruments into their enterprise, in keeping with an individual aware of the matter.
Cursor’s enterprise push appears to be gaining traction. Anysphere mentioned it reached $500 million in ARR in June, and now works with greater than half of the Fortune 500, together with NVIDIA, Uber, and Adobe. A supply aware of the matter says that income has since grown, and an more and more giant share of that progress comes from enterprise offers.
However as Cursor competes with Microsoft, it additionally must fend off a rising subject of threats.
Essentially the most urgent one is Anthropic, a vital associate to Anysphere whose Claude Code product has grown quickly in latest months. Cursor depends closely on Anthropic’s AI fashions to energy its personal coding merchandise. (As one among its greatest clients, Cursor can also be important to Anthropic.)
On the similar time, Google simply scooped up the management workforce of Windsurf, a serious competitor to Cursor within the AI-powered IDE house. Cognition, the maker of the AI coding agent Devin, acquired the remainder of Windsurf’s workforce, probably providing a major carry to each companies.
It’s price noting that every one of those are several types of AI instruments, however employers are likely to view the merchandise equally: as AI instruments that may enhance the productiveness of software program engineers. These employers might need the fitting thought. In spite of everything, Anthropic, Microsoft, Cursor, and Cognition are all creating AI coding brokers which purpose to automate workflows fully, which can be the place the AI coding house converges.
You would possibly ask, why is everybody competing with everybody else to construct AI coding merchandise? Coding instruments have grow to be one of many first AI merchandise to search out “product market match” — the elusive purpose that makes the ears of enterprise capitalists perk up. AI coding merchandise are getting used day by day by thousands and thousands of software program engineers, they usually have began to generate actual income.
Put one other approach, the race isn’t nearly constructing the very best AI coding instrument anymore. It’s about who can scale their enterprise operations the quickest whereas the market remains to be up for grabs. With the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic all transferring quick, Cursor’s acquisition technique could decide whether or not it joins their ranks or turns into one other startup that couldn’t scale quick sufficient.
