Cursor owner buys AI coding assistant Supermaven

The company behind AI code editor Cursor has bought AI coding assistant Supermaven.

Anysphere will initially use Supermaven's capabilities to launch a smarter and faster version of its autocomplete feature, Cursor Tab.

The new Tab would be "context aware" and better able to deal with long code sequences.

As well as boosting Cursor, the sale should allow Supermaven's developers more freedom to innovate.

Since its launch nine months ago, the copilot has introduced features including an in-editor chat and support for deleting code and jumping to other parts of your codebase. It's also vastly improved its Babble AI model.

The Supermaven team have bigger ambitions for their copilot, but they say their progress was limited by a reliance on external APIs.

At the moment, the software is available as a plugin for programs like VSCode, JetBrains and Neovim. The scope of their APIs limits what can be achieved with the software.

Before the sale, Supermaven was toying with building its own code editor, "because extension APIs were blocking the next useful things that they wanted to build," Anysphere CEO Michael Truell said in a blog post.

Supermaven CEO Jacob Jackson added: "We realized that the next step for the product was not just smarter models, but models with new capabilities (like jumps) co-designed with the user interface to access those capabilities."

"Initially, we worked to build our own editor," he wrote in his own blog. "But we were also in touch with the Cursor team, and as I came to know them better I felt we could build a much more useful product together than Supermaven could build alone."

Supermaven will maintain its plugins for the foreseeable future, upgrading them with new models when available. But Truell says the team will largely focus on Cursor.

Launched in 2023, Cursor has already become an invaluable tool for many developers. In addition to Tab, its Chat feature allows users to ask questions about their codebase in natural language.

Supermaven was founded by pioneering developer Jacob Jackson, who launched the first ever AI code completing tool Tabnine in 2019. He has since worked at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

Neither company has shared the cost of the deal.