Good morning, tech reporter Beatrice Nolan here, filling in for Allie Garfinkle. We just wrapped up Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco, where apparently everyone wants to be the next trillion-dollar company.
Amid the bubble trouble and agentic optimism, we also heard from Cursor CEO Michael Truell about how the company is feeling about the—increasingly hot—competition and a potential IPO.
Cursor, which provides an AI code editing tool that is popular with software engineers, has enjoyed a meteoric rise to $29.3 billion valuation just over two years after releasing its first product. Even as leading AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic lean into building their own coding tools, Truell said he wasn’t sweating the competition.
That’s because Cursor benefits from and builds off other companies’ base models, he said. Cursor’s approach is to cherry-pick the best models available, supplement them with proprietary ones where necessary, and wrap it all into what Truell says is the best user interface for AI coding.
Part of the reason for this optimism may be that Cursor is already seeing some promising results from within its own organization. Truell says the company had already automated roughly 80% of its employee support tickets with the help of the tech. He also said Cursor had implemented an internal AI-powered communication system that allows employees to glean information from across the organization.
