People are excited for code completion powered by AI. Excited as in: they are willing to pay for it.

A year ago, GitHub Copilot, a product launched in 2021, surpassed $100M ARR. It’s roughly 1M paying customers, given the lower tier is at $100 per year. For comparison, GitHub (+15 years old, launched in 2007) reached $1000M ARR in the same year. It only took two years for Copilot to account for 10% of GitHub’s ARR. But that was already a year ago; according to some Satya Nadella declarations this summer, Copilot may have surpassed $200M.

On different headquarters, 2024 has also been a good year. There were $83M invested in Cursor ($11M, $60M) and Supermaven ($12M), which recently announced they’ll join forces.

Cursor self-describes as “the AI Code Editor”: it’s a fork of VSCode that differs in a few DX things and that uses more LLMs for autocompletion — OpenAI’s ChatGPT like GitHub Copilot does, and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet LLM. Supermaven is an extension that works in a few editors, and it self-describes as “the fastest Copilot”. They claim their custom LLM is superior to others because it can process more of your code (1M tokens) to suggest better alternatives, faster.

So, there’s competition and money around “AI autocompletion”. But, whose money is it?

Show me the money

The first contestant is Microsoft. They own the editor (VS Code), the service mediator (GitHub Copilot), the LLMs (by being the major investor of OpenAI), and the platform (the models run in Azure).

However, since Cursor came along, Microsoft has been forced to do some moves. VS Code has implemented some interactions that had been pioneered by Cursor and others. But, more importantly, GitHub Copilot now also offers Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet LLM, that runs in Amazon Cloud Services. Microsoft has been forced to share its Copilot’s revenue with its major competitors in LLMs (Anthropic, being Amazon the major investor) and platforms (AWS by Amazon).

That’s an interesting turn of events. Specially if you consider who funded Cursor: OpenAI led the seed round and OpenAI participated in the second. Cursor raised money to compete against Microsoft from… Microsoft. That wouldn’t be an entirely correct way to put it, but it wouldn’t be totally incorrect either.

Coda

Platforms and LLMs are very tightly connected and are the lion’s share of revenue. The editors are just highly disposable tools that give you access to LLMs.