When it was learned that Openai was in conversations to acquire AI Coding Company Windsurf for $ 3 billion, one of the first questions about the mind of anyone who followed the space was likely: “Why not buy the cursor creator in his place?”
After all, the Operai start fund has been an investor in Anyphere, the cursor manufacturer, from the seed round of the rapidly growing coding assistant at the end of 2023. (Anysthere often refers for the name of its product, the cursor). It turns out that Openai approached Anyphere in 2024 and again earlier this year on a potential acquisition, according to one of the one of the CNBC report. The conversations failed. Instead, Anysphere has been in conversations to raise capital at an assessment of approximately $ 10 billion, Bloomberg reported last month.
Openai’s desire to move on to acquisition discussions with another coding assistant indicates how important the capture of a portion of the code generation market for the Chatgpt manufacturer has become. Windsurf is generating around $ 40 million in annual recurring income (RR), TechCrunch reported in February. Meanwhile, Anysphere’s cursor wins around $ 200 million to Rra.
While Openai’s Codex Cli “Agent”, which the company launched on Wednesday, can also write and edit code, its attempt to buy Windsurf suggests that the company does not want to wait for Cli to win traction with customers.
