Anysphere, creator of AI-powered code editor Cursor, has acquired AI coding assistant Supermaven for an undisclosed amount.
Anysphere CEO Michael Truell announced the deal in a post on Cursor's blog. Supermaven will enable Anysphere to launch a new version of the Tab AI model that is “fast, context-aware, and highly intelligent,” especially for long sequences of code, he said.
Truell said Supermaven's plugins will continue to be maintained, but Cursor will be the core of the team.
“This is pretty much the same as Supermaven's previous plans. The extension API was blocking the next useful thing we wanted to build, so the team shifted its focus to the editor,” Truell wrote in the post. “Why join forces? We have a lot of work to do, but together we can build more useful products faster.”
Superrmaven was founded by Jacob Jackson, who previously co-founded Tabnine, an 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 in the vein of Tabnine, but with some quality of life and technical upgrades. Babble, an in-house generative AI model, can understand much code at once and has very low latency thanks to its custom architecture.
As of September, over 35,000 developers had signed up for Supermaven. And Supermaven successfully raised $12 million from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman, and Perplexity co-founder Denis Yarats.
Supermaven, which launched in February, had no plans to exit. But Jackson says the timing felt right.
“As Supermaven matured, we realized that the next step for our product was not just smarter models, but models with new features co-designed with a user interface to access those features. ” he wrote in a post on Supermaven's blog. “Initially, we were working on building our own editor, but we also kept in touch with the Cursor team and got to know them better, and together we built a product that was much more useful than Supermaven could have built on its own. I felt that I could build on it.”
As part of Cursor, Jackson added that the Supermaven team will be able to design the editor UI alongside the model.
The acquisition comes after Anysphere received unsolicited offers from Benchmark, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and others that valued the company at $2.5 billion, TechCrunch exclusively reported. Interest in the company, co-founded in 2022 by Truell, Sueleh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger, has exploded in recent weeks.
The market for AI coding tools is growing significantly, with Polaris Research predicting it will reach a value of $27.17 billion by 2032. The majority of respondents to GitHub's latest developer survey said they had implemented some form of AI tooling. And over 1.8 million people and nearly 50,000 companies pay for GitHub Copilot.
There is no shortage of AI-powered coding assistance startups. See Augment, Codeium, Magic, Poolside. However, Cursor has become one of the most popular options. Sources told TechCrunch that the company's revenue has increased to $4 million per month.