Investing in Cursor

LLMs are getting good at writing code.

All of the major AI models can now perform basic programming tasks reliably (with greater than 90% accuracy). They are starting to tackle more complicated real-world tasks through planning and multi-turn prompting strategies. And they can do it in more than 80 languages.

However, writing code isn’t just about writing new code. The majority of a developer’s time is spent maintaining, debugging, or tweaking code. And to do that reliably requires actually understanding the code and the intent of the system. Building software is a fundamentally creative process — you can shift around the hard parts, but you can’t automate them away completely.

So, it’s very clear that LLMs are a powerful tool for programmers, and that their coding abilities will improve over time. But it’s also clear that for most coding tasks, the problem to solve is not how to make LLMs perform well in isolation, but how to make them perform well alongside a human developer.

We believe, therefore, the interface between programmers and AI models will soon become one of the most important pieces of the dev stack. And we’re thrilled to announce our series A investment in Cursor, the leading company working on this problem.

Cursor is a fork of VS Code that’s heavily customized for AI-assisted programming. It works with all the latest LLMs and supports the full VS Code plugin ecosystem. What makes Cursor special are the features designed to integrate AI into developer workflows — including next action prediction, natural language edits, chatting with your codebase, and a bunch of new ones to come.

This kind of product turns out to be very hard to get right. Perfecting the text editor has taken decades, and it’s a topic that still elicits passionate arguments among developers. AI-assisted editing is arguably even more complicated, requiring new workflows (e.g., how do you edit more than one file at once? how do you inject new code in the middle of a file?) and managing state with an external, non-deterministic system. This has to be done in a way that’s highly performant, feels natural, and doesn’t interfere with developers’ normal work.

Our belief is that Cursor, distinctly among AI coding tools, has simply gotten it right. That’s why, in a little over a year, thousands of users have signed up for Cursor, including at companies like OpenAI, Midjourney, Perplexity, Replicate, Shopify, Instacart, and many others. Users give glowing reviews of the product, many of them have started to pay for it, and they rarely switch back to other IDEs. Most of the a16z Infra team have also become avid Cursor users!

This early success is due to the clear vision and relentless execution from Michael Truell, Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and the rest of the Cursor team. They are obsessed with the problem of better AI coding, and they are laser-focused on building a great developer experience. They are also clear about what’s not necessary for them to do (training a new foundation model, for example). As LLMs continue to improve, we think Cursor will be the way many developers consume this powerful new tool.

We couldn’t be more excited to back this team. If you haven’t tried AI coding models yet — and especially if you are an AI coding skeptic — give Cursor a try.