AI startup Cursor raises $2.3B funding round at $29.3B valuation (www.cnbc.com)

AI coding startup Cursor closed a massive $2.3 billion financing round at a $29.3 billion post-money valuation, nearly triple its worth since June. The company—born inside applied research lab Anysphere—says its in-house models power a popular tool for generating, editing and reviewing code, and that it has crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue and grown to 300+ employees. High-profile endorsements (Nvidia’s Jensen Huang called it his “favorite enterprise AI service”) and prior acquisition interest from OpenAI underline strong market attention; Cursor’s CEO said an IPO is not imminent as the company doubles down on product and R&D. The raise underscores how lucrative and strategic code-specialized LLMs have become. Cursor claims its models generate more code than “almost” any other large models, pointing to heavy optimization for developer workflows and enterprise usage. That positions Cursor in direct competition with OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude Code) and Cognition (Windsurf), and signals continued investment in model fine-tuning, safety, and integrations tailored to programming tasks. For the AI/ML community, this highlights an accelerating arms race around code-centric architectures, dataset curation, and deployment scale — plus renewed consolidation and valuation pressure in an increasingly crowded tooling market.