All posts tagged: ai coding assistant

Datadog veterans launch AI coding startup Niteshift on a bet against Big AI lock-in

Datadog veterans launch AI coding startup Niteshift on a bet against Big AI lock-in

Published by skeptic

AI coding agent startup Niteshift has raised a $7 million seed round led by Greylock’s Jerry Chen. That’s a modest sum by AI standards, but the startup, founded by two former early Datadog engineers, has attracted some big-name angels like Reid Hoffman, Datadog’s Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, Ankur Goyal of Braintrust, and Misha Laskin of Reflection AI.  Founded by Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan, who helped grow Datadog from its early days to a multi-billion valuation, the company has entered the crowded AI coding space with a compelling idea: Why would any company trust its most sensitive assets — code that runs its products — directly to model makers like OpenAI and Anthropic, given that those companies are constantly “killing” startups and businesses by launching competing apps? Mehmood, who is CEO, likens it to Datadog’s early growth, when the monitoring company won e-commerce customers who refused to build on Amazon Web Services. It was a reasonable concern, given that Amazon was simultaneously putting many of those same retail stores out of business in what …

Cursor has reportedly surpassed B in annualized revenue

Cursor has reportedly surpassed $2B in annualized revenue

Published by skeptic

The AI coding assistant Cursor has surpassed $2 billion in annualized revenue, a metric calculated by multiplying the latest month’s revenue by 12, according to a Bloomberg source. This individual says the four-year-old startup saw its revenue run rate double over the past three months. The disclosure appears timed to counter a recent wave of skepticism. Last week, tweets went viral questioning whether Cursor’s momentum was stalling, citing high-profile defections by individual developers to competing tools — particularly Anthropic’s Claude Code. Founded in 2022, Cursor initially sold its product primarily to individual developers. Over the last year, however, it has focused more on landing large corporate buyers, which now account for approximately 60% of revenue, according to Bloomberg. While some individual developers and smaller startups have switched from Cursor to Claude Code, which is seen as more competitively priced, that attrition seems to higher-spending corporate customers who tend to stick around longer. Beyond Claude Code, OpenAI’s coding tool Codex is also competing for share in the rapidly growing market for AI-assisted software development. Other startups …