Cursor raises $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation

Cursor raises $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation. Nvidia and Google both joined the round.

Cursor launched its own in-house mixture-of-experts model, rewrote the kernels directly, skipping high-level CUDA libraries and working directly in raw CUDA and PTX (link). They got up to four times faster than comparable models. For engineers, that’s not just a speed bump, it’s a different category of tool. Coding tasks that used to take minutes are now completed in under 30 seconds. According to Cursor, their own model is already the most-used on the platform, which means they’re not just riding on OpenAI or Anthropic anymore. They’re building the rails themselves.

Nvidia’s investment makes sense: Cursor trains on thousands of Nvidia GPUs and is one of their biggest customers. The optimisation work makes Nvidia’s hardware faster, and Cursor’s growth means more GPU purchases.

Google, meanwhile, is hedging. They invested, they’re supporting it, but they’re also a competitor with their own code generation tools and ecosystem. This is Google’s signature move. Be a player in the space and an investor in the space. It’s a way of winning no matter what happens.

If Cursor becomes the dominant challenger to GitHub Copilot, Google gains influence through its investment and seat at the table. If Google’s own tools win out, they have a hedge against missing something. Either way, they’re pushing Cursor toward deeper vertical integration and away from dependency on OpenAI and Anthropic. That serves Google’s interests regardless of who ends up on top.

This is what market dominance looks like now. It’s not about building the single best tool. It’s about holding enough positions that you win through the ecosystem itself.