Cursor In Talks To Raise Funds At A $10B Valuation As The AI Coding Sector Booms
AI is adapting fastest in coding tools, outpacing its use in sales, law, healthcare, and other sectors, according to investors.
Investor interest in AI coding assistants is exploding. Anysphere, the developer of AI-powered coding assistant Cursor, is in talks with venture capitalists to raise capital at a valuation of nearly $10 billion, Bloomberg reported.
The round, if it transpires, would come about three months after Anysphere completed its previous fundraise of $100 million at a pre-money valuation of $2.5 billion, as TechCrunch was first to report. The new round is expected to be led by returning investor Thrive Capital.
Thrive Capital and Anysphere didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
While Anysphere’s previous round valued the company at 25 times its $100 million ARR (per The New York Times), investors seem to be willing to value fast-growing companies at even higher multiples now. Anysphere’s current annualized recurring revenue (ARR) may have already climbed to $150 million, The Information reported, which means the new deal, should it happen would be a whopping 66 times ARR.
Anysphere isn’t the only company receiving such a high valuation from investors.
Codeium, a company behind AI coding editor Windsurf, is raising capital at a valuation of nearly $3 billion, TechCrunch reported last month. Kleiner Perkins, which is leading the round into Codeium, valued the company at about 70 times ARR of about $40 million.
More on Cursor’s funding and investor interest in AI coding
CEO Of Microsoft On The Future of Tech
While he hardly needs an introduction, few leaders have shaped the future of technology quite like Satya Nadella. He stepped into Microsoft’s top job at a catalytic moment—making bold bets on the cloud, embedding AI into the fabric of computing, all while staying true to Microsoft’s vision of becoming a “software factory.”
In this conversation with Aditya Agarwal and Ruchi Sanghvi, Satya discusses: • his approach to building early at Microsoft and why we all need to continue “refounding” • the future of AI and why critical thinking will remain at a premium • Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, his vision for quantum, and more
UPCOMING INTERVIEW ON THE (A)BSOLUTELY (I)NCREDIBLE PODCAST
I’m expanding the (A)bsolutely (I)ncredible Podcast to include interviews with thought leaders who are passionately working on revolutionary transformation, powered by AI.
On the inaugural episode, I welcomed Theodora Lau, the Founder of Unconventional Ventures, and author of a the new book being published by Palgrave Macmillan.
The complete interview will be posted soon on the (A)bsolutely (I)ncredible podcast.
Banking on (Artificial) Intelligence: Navigating the Realities of AI in Financial Services. Theodora has been recognized as one American Banker’s Top 20 most influential women in Fintech, and the host of the amazing One Vision Podcast.
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Sesame & The Promise Of Real AI Voice
In a way, we’ve always known this was the watershed moment for AI – when we actually start conversing with these digital entities, as if they were real people.
There’s a new voice model in town, and it’s called Sesame. As I so often do, I got a lot of information on this new technology from Nathaniel Whittemore at AI Daily Brief, where he covered interest in this conversational AI.
Quoting Deedy Das of Menlo Ventures calling Sesame “the GPT-3 moment for voice,” Whittemore talked about what he called an “incredible explosion” of voice-based models happening now. “This is an area that we’ve been thinking about a lot,” he said.
He pointed out that the Sesame model itself is small, with around 1 billion parameters, and that larger models are also in the works. Whittemore played us part of a demo by Ethan Mollick, who I’ve often covered as a prominent voice in AI analysis (and someone connected to the MIT community).
You can hear how Mollick brings a certain level of skepticism to the conversation, but what was most interesting to me was where the podcast cut off, at the very point that Mollick asks the AI voice what she does for a living. To wit: this exchange -
Mollick: “So what do you do for a living, Maya?”
Maya: “’Living’ is a strong word.
More of John Werner’s assessment of Sesame AI on Forbes
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Apple’s New M4 Mac mini Is The Perfect Computer For Experimenting With AI
The new M4 Mac mini is tiny, convenient, and a great way to test Apple Intelligence.
Along with the new M4 MacBook Pro series Apple is releasing, the company is also quite proud, and rightly so, of the new Mac mini. The Mac mini is arguably the more radical of the two: Apple’s diminutive computer has now received its first major design overhaul in 13 years.
Yet the new mini has more to offer than a redesign. For much of the past week, I’ve been using Apple’s newest desktop ahead of its official launch tomorrow. Here are my thoughts on its upgrades and who this miniature machine is for.
The new Mac mini is available in two different chip configurations—either the M4 or the more powerful M4 Pro, which sports more processing cores and a better GPU, making it ideal for tasks like high-end video editing and gaming.
Storage options start at 256GB and go all the way up to 8TB on select models. Memory options start at 16GB or 24GB on select models and can go as high as 64GB. The model I tested had the M4 Pro chipset with 48GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.
But I’ll delve more into the mini’s specs later. First I want to start with the unboxing. When I took the review unit Apple sent me out of the box, I was struck by the fact that that the computer could nearly fit in the palm of my hand. Without a doubt, its size is the most noticeable thing about the redesign.
The mini has always been Apple’s smallest computer, but it really earns its name with this latest iteration. It’s now just 5 inches by 5 inches square (with rounded corners, of course—this is Apple). That’s down from the 7.7-inch squared M2 model this new mini replaces (there was never an M3 Mac mini). To put the mini’s new size into even more perspective, it’s now not much bigger than an Apple TV 4K, which is just 3.66 inches squared. I’ve included links below to great deals on M4 Apple Silicon devices.
Apple M4 Max MacBook Pro 16” | M4 Mac mini | M4 Mac mini Pro | M4 iPad Pro
More on the M4 Mac mini and M4 MacBook Pro on Fast Company
Meet GibberLink, Conversational AI's Secret Machine Language | ElevenLabs
Join Boris Starkov and Anton Pidkuiko, the developers behind GibberLink, for a fireside chat with Luke Harries from ElevenLabs. On February 24, Georgi Gerganov, the creator of the GGwave protocol, showcased their demo at the ElevenLabs London hackathon on X, garnering attention from around the world—including Forbes, TechCrunch, and the entire developer community.
Wayne Rasanen’s Award Winning DecaTxt 3 | A One-Handed Keyboard
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Shield AI Raises $240M At A $5.3 Billion Valuation To Commercialize It’s Hivemind
Shield AI is now one of the U.S.'s biggest defense tech startups by valuation, raising $240 million at a $5.3 billion valuation in its latest round. Shield AI, the San Diego defense tech startup that builds drones and other AI-powered military systems, has raised a $240 million round at a $5.3 billion valuation, it announced today.
Shield AI says its Hivemind software already enables fighter jets and drones to fly autonomously. Now, Shield AI wants to sell Hivemind to a broader range of customers like robotics companies. The round’s investors include L3Harris, one of the U.S.’s biggest defense contractors, and Hanwha Aerospace. Existing investors like Andreessen Horowitz also joined.
This makes Shield AI the second-largest defense tech startup in the U.S. by valuation, after Anduril, which is raising at a $28 billion valuation. Autonomy is a hot field in defense, with autonomous warship startup Saronic quadrupling its valuation to $4 billion in a $600 million round last month.
More on Shield AI’s funding round on TechCrunch
Mistral OCR | Multimodal And Multilingual
In this video, Sam Witteveen looks at the latest release from Mistral AI, which is their Mistral OCR model. He looks at how it works and how it compares to other models.
And how you can get started using it with code as well. Colab: https://dripl.ink/Dgt3x
Mistral’s blog on the document understanding API: https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ocr
Thats all for today, but AI is moving fast - subscribe and follow for more Neural News.