SAN FRANCISCO(National Times)- SpaceX said on Tuesday it will acquire artificial intelligence coding startup Cursor for $60 billion as shares of Elon Musk’s rocket company soared for a third straight session after a record-breaking IPO.
Near 1130am (1530 GMT), shares of SpaceX, formally Space Exploration Technologies Corp., stood at $214.29, up 11.2 per cent, and lifting its market value above Amazon to become the fifth largest enterprise in terms of market valuation.
Cursor, founded in 2022 and based in San Francisco, specialises in AI for creating software code, particularly for business uses. An acquisition had looked possible after the two companies had announced a partnership in April that included a clause for Cursor to be potentially bought by SpaceX for $60 billion.
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, SpaceX said the all-stock deal was expected to close in the third quarter of this year and that Cursor would become a wholly owned subsidiary.
Combining Cursor’s software and product expertise with SpaceX’s “Colossus” AI training supercomputer will enable the company “to build the world’s most useful models,” the companies said in April when announcing their partnership.
Cursor had initially emerged as a platform where developers could interface with other AI models, such as Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Gemini programme.
In late October, Cursor’s parent company Anysphere launched its own model, Composer, which has since been updated at a competitively priced level.
Cursor’s emergence has coincided with the growth of “vibe coding,” whereby online users ditch written codes and build applications by commands executed by AI.
The company has also been boosted by the growing capacity of AI “agents,” which are able to undertake tasks of increasing sophistication well beyond responding to research queries.
Cursor described the latest version, Composer 2.5, as a “substantial improvement” over Composer 2.
“It is better at sustained work on long-running tasks, follows complex instructions more reliably, and is more pleasant to collaborate with,” according to a May 18 blog post.
Growth at Cursor has been accelerated by increased business with the private sector, where there is a greater volume of work and profit margins are more robust compared with individual clients. At its last funding round in November, Cursor was valued at $29 billion.
