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Anysphere<\/a>, a startup building what it describes as an \u201cAI-native\u201d software development environment, called Cursor<\/a>, today announced that it raised $8 million in seed funding led by OpenAI\u2019s Startup Fund with participation from former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi and other angel investors.<\/p>\n The new cash, which brings Anysphere\u2019s total raised to $11 million, will be put toward hiring and supporting Anysphere\u2019s AI and machine learning research, co-founder and CEO Michael Truell said<\/p>\n \u201cIn the next several years, our mission is to make programming an order of magnitude faster, more fun and creative,\u201d\u00a0Truell told TechCrunch in an email interview. \u201cOur platform enables all developers to build software faster.\u201d<\/p>\n Truell met Anysphere\u2019s other co-founders, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger, while at MIT, where they became close friends. The four shared the goal of creating an integrated development environment (IDE) that could speed up common programming and software building tasks, like debugging.<\/p>\n To that end, Cursor, which is a fork of VS Code, Microsoft\u2019s open source code editor, packs AI-powered tools designed to help developers write \u2014 and ask questions about \u2014 code. Cursor can respond to queries like \u201cWhat service in VS Code lets me save a state to disk,\u201d for instance, and pull up relevant documentation and code definitions as programmers work.<\/p>\n Cursor also features generative AI capabilities powered by OpenAI models, namely the ability to generate code from a prompt. And it can passively scan files and surface potential bugs in codebases.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen people think \u2018AI plus coding,\u2019 their mind usually goes to AI-powered autocomplete,\u201d Sanger said via email. \u201cWe think this has been done particularly well by GitHub Copilot and others, so we\u2019re focused on features that come after<\/em> autocomplete, like finding and fixing bugs and codebase Q&A.\u201d<\/p>\n