Anysphere acquires Supermaven to beef up Cursor

Anysphere, the company behind AI-powered code editor Cursor, has acquired AI coding assistant Supermaven for an undisclosed sum.

Anysphere CEO Michael Truell announced the deal in a post on Cursor’s blog. Supermaven, he said, will enable Anysphere to launch a new version of its Tab AI model that’s “fast, context-aware, and highly intelligent,” especially at sequences of long code.

Supermaven’s plugins will remain maintained, Truell said, though Cursor will become the team’s core focus.

“This is roughly the same as Supermaven’s previous plan: the team had shifted focus to an editor, because extension APIs were blocking the next useful things that they wanted to build,” Truell wrote in his post. “Why join forces? We have a lot to do, and it seems like we can build a more useful product, faster, together.”

Supermaven was founded by Jacob Jackson, who previously co-founded Tabnine, the AI coding assistant. After selling Tabnine to Codata in 2019, Jackson joined OpenAI as an intern, where he worked until 2022.

Supermaven is an AI coding platform along the lines of Tabnine, but with a few quality-of-life and technical upgrades. Its in-house generative AI model, Babble, can understand a lot of code at once, and thanks to a custom architecture, it is extremely low-latency.

As of September, more than 35,000 developers had signed up for Supermaven. And Supermaven managed to raise $12 million from investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman, and Perplexity co-founder Denis Yarats. 

Supermaven, which launched in February, wasn’t planning for an exit. But the timing felt right, Jackson says.

“As Supermaven matured, we realized that the next step for the product was not just smarter models, but models with new capabilities co-designed with the user interface to access those capabilities,” he wrote in a post on Supermaven’s blog. “Initially, we worked to build our own editor, but we were also in touch with the Cursor team, and as I came to know them better, I felt we could build a much more useful product together than Supermaven could build alone.”

As part of Cursor, the Supermaven team will have the ability to design the editor UI together with the models, Jackson added.

The acquisition comes as Anysphere receives unsolicited offers, valuing the company at as much as $2.5 billion, from Benchmark, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and others, TechCrunch exclusively reported. Interest in the company, which was co-founded in 2022 by Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger, has exploded in recent weeks.

The market for AI coding tools is a large and growing one, with Polaris Research projecting that it’ll be worth $27.17 billion by 2032. The vast majority of respondents in GitHub’s latest dev poll say that they’ve adopted AI tools in some form, and over 1.8 million people — and ~50,000 businesses — are paying for GitHub Copilot.

There’s no shortage of AI-powered coding assistance startups — see Augment, Codeium, Magic, and Poolside. But Cursor has become one of the more popular options. Sources tell TechCrunch that its revenue has grown to $4 million a month.