AI
AI
AI
Well-funded artificial intelligence startup Anysphere Inc. is expanding beyond its viral generative AI code editor and into “agentic AI” with the launch of new web and mobile browser-based orchestration tools for coding agents.
Anysphere last month closed on a bumper $900 million funding round that valued it at a cool $9.9 billion. It’s the company behind the popular AI code generating assistant Cursor, which automates software writing tasks for developers. Cursor embeds itself directly into the programmer’s integrated development environment and responds to natural language prompts by generating code, explaining it and performing various other tasks.
With today’s launch, Anysphere is accelerating an expansion beyond the IDE that began in May when it launched “background agents” that can help to automate coding tasks without any supervision from developers. A month later, as it announced its big funding round, it also debuted a Slack integration that makes it simple to assign tasks to these background agents within the popular chat application by tagging them @Cursor, similar to the way that Cognition AI Inc.’s Devin coding agent works.
Once again, Anysphere is putting its AI coding agents into more places, and this time it’s targeting the web browser. With its new application, developers can send natural language prompts from a mobile or web-based browser directly to the background agents, instructing them to perform tasks like writing new features or fixing bugs. Using the web app, developers can also monitor fleets of agents that are busy working on different tasks, check their progress and register those that have been completed within the underlying codebase.
Anysphere explained that developers can instruct its AI agents to complete tasks via the web app, and if they’re unable to do so, they can seamlessly switch to the IDE to take over and see what’s caused it to come unstuck. Each of its agents has its own shareable link, which developers can click on to see its progress.
Cursor’s evolution has helped to grow its popularity, and Anysphere said today it’s now generating more than $500 million in annualized recurring revenue from subscribers to the tool. It counts more than half of the Fortune 500 as customers, including illustrious names such as Nvidia Corp., Adobe Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc.
Last month, Anysphere launched a new $200-per-month “Ultra” tier for Cursor that’s aimed at these kinds of big enterprise users, giving them more advanced functionality and greater scale. As far as today’s move is concerned, it’s an effort to “remove the friction” for these users, Anysphere Head of Product Engineering Andrew Milich told TechCrunch. He explained that customers want Cursor to operate in more places, and “solve more of the problems they’re having.”
The new web app will be available to all subscribers who have access to its background agents, which basically means everyone except those on the free tier.
Anysphere is not the first AI startup to launch coding agents that can use multiple tools, but Anysphere Chief Executive Ben Thompson told Stratechery in an interview last month that it was necessary to wait for AI reasoning models to advance to a point where it can ensure the accuracy and reliability of its agents. That time has come, he said, so hopefully Cursor’s users won’t find themselves bogged down dealing with mistakes.
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