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A massive new funding round at a serious valuation for one of the leaders of the vibe coding movement. Welcome back to the AI De-brief Headlines Edition—all the daily AI news you need in around 5 minutes. We kick off today with some fundraising news. Cursor developer, AnySphere, is set to close a new funding round that would value the company at $1 billion. Bloomberg is reporting that Thrive Capital is expected to lead the round, adding to their position in the company.
Now, it's been clear for a while that Cursor appears to be one of the big winners, or at least leaders, in the AI startup boom, but the numbers really spell out how unprecedented their success is. Assuming this deal closes, Cursor will have achieved a 4X multiple from their Series B, which closed at a $250 million valuation last December. That round was itself a massive 6.5X jump from their Series A, which closed at $400 million in August. The revenue growth really tells the story. Cursor was reportedly at $20 million in annualized revenue in August, quintupling to $100 million by December and is now humming along at $150 million in ARR. The multiple is now 66 times revenue, up from 25 times during the Series B. That said, for people who have the appetite, there are just very few opportunities to buy into this type of growth, even if you look historically across the history of venture capital. AnySphere achieved $100 million in ARR just 18 months from the launch of their flagship product. That puts them in extraordinarily rarified air.
Mostly, Cursor lovers are excited about the deal. Linear CEO Ki Sarin writes, "Growth shows the power of integrating well-designed and purposeful AI into existing product paradigms. The AI-native empty page plus chatbot approach can work, but it's often far from the practical workflows professionals and businesses actually need." Point being that, as opposed to a lot of the text-to-code tools, this one is actually purpose-built for developers to integrate AI into their existing processes. At the same time, some people are skeptical of the multiple. Autograph CEO Hari writes, "I know lots of teams already switching away. An ARR multiple of 66X would be reasonable for the growth rate, but this isn't ARR; it's more like pilot revenue. I hope the Cursor founders, employees, and early investors are taking some secondary." Ultimately, the short of it is Cursor is very hot right now, and investors are more concerned with getting in than overpaying.
Staying on this white-hot theme of coding generation, a pair of top researchers from Google DeepMind have unveiled a new startup working on next-generation coding agents. The company, Reflection AI, emerged from stealth at the end of last week to announce $25 million in seed funding and a $105 million Series A. Sequoia Capital and CRV led the seed round, while Lightspeed Ventures and CRV anchored the Series A. Reid Hoffman, Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang, SV Angel, and Nvidia all participated, valuing the company at $555 million. The two founders previously did things like leading reinforcement training for Gemini and also helping create AlphaGo, which was, of course, the paradigm-breaking AI that was the first to beat human experts at the board game Go. The goal for the company is to create autonomous coding agents, which the founders hope will be a step on the path towards superintelligence. Misha Laskin, the company's CEO, said, "This is the problem we've been thinking about for over a decade. Our team pioneered reinforcement learning and large language models, and we decided that now is the time to kind of bring both of those advancements together and build out a practical superintelligence that will do work on a computer." Reflection already has paying customers in fields that maintain large coding teams, such as financial services and the tech sector. At this stage, the product is focused on replacing the most tedious work involved in programming, things like migrating software databases and refactoring code. Lightspeed partner As Jane said, "I don't think it's about replacing engineers' jobs. I think it's more about instead of engineers doing grunt work, they'll become like architects who will oversee lots and lots of autonomous agents." If you are interested in that way of thinking, please go check out the Doctor Strange theory of agent work, which is an episode I put out about a week ago.
Moving over into the world of Big Tech, Apple has acknowledged that AI Siri isn't coming anytime soon. John Gruber at Daring Fireball reported the news, posting a statement from a company spokesperson which read, "Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past 6 months we've made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like Type to Siri and product knowledge, and added in integration with ChatGPT. We've also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features, and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year." John Gruber, the blog's author, commented that it was a "Friday sort of 'wa-wa-wa' sad trombone news drop." He added that, reading between the lines, his sense is that AI Siri is being pushed to next year's iOS 19 rather than coming this year.
Bloomberg, with the assistance of insider sources, is reporting the news even more strongly. They claim there are "new heights of turmoil in the AI division," and honestly, with how staggeringly behind they are, there should be turmoil over there. Bloomberg had previously reported that there was a sprint to squash bugs in hopes of pushing a new version of Siri this year, but they now report that those efforts have been unsuccessful. Adding in the lead-up to the latest delay, software chief Craig Federighi and other executives voiced strong concerns internally that the features didn't work properly or as advertised in their internal testing. Some within Apple's AI division believe that work on the features could be scrapped altogether, and that Apple may have to rebuild the functions from scratch. The capabilities would then be delayed until a next-generation Siri that Apple hopes to begin rolling out in 2026. Bloomberg also received a leaked memo to Apple Care support staff issued on Friday, which said, "If customers ask about the timing of these Siri features, reiterate that we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year." Keep in mind that AI Siri was pretty much the central sales pitch for the latest iPhone, meaning that this is not going to be a particularly satisfying explanation to a lot of those customers asking questions.
In a final admission that things are not going according to plan, Apple has apparently pulled their advertisements for the iPhone 16 from YouTube. The series featured the user asking Siri to name the person they had dinner with a couple of months ago, recalling and summarizing a pitch meeting, and creating generative video memories. Apple intelligence has exactly zero of these features more than 9 months after they were first advertised. Just brutal, man. I am not rooting against this company—all the products that I use basically are Apple—but boy, they have got to get it together. Anyways, for now, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition. Next up, the main episode.