In February, AI Coding Startup Wind Surf Cleaner, headed by Parkins, was talking to collecting a big new round at a price of $ 2.85 billion, at which time it doubled six months ago. According to sources familiar with the matter, this agreement was not reached. Instead, in April, the news was broken that Startup planned to sell itself to SAME in the same diagnosis: $ 3 billion.
Although this contract is popularly separated, there is a big question: If the startup is growing rapidly and attracting VC’s interest, why will it sell exactly?
Internal sources tell the Tech Crunch that all the popularity around AI coding assistants and the hype they can be really large -scale losing businesses. A man near the wind surf told the Tech Crunch, usually web coders, and especially in the wind surf that his overall margins “are very negative”, a man near the wind surf told the Tech Crunch. This means that it costs more to run the product, which can take the startup for it.
The person said that this is the reason for using a large language model. AI coding assistants are particularly pressured to always offer recent, highly modern and highly expensive LLMs as the model makers are particularly fixing their latest models to improve coding and work like debugging.
This is a challenge that has a fierce competition in the wibk coding and code assist market. Competitors include companies that already have large -scale customer bases such as infer cursor and gut hub pilot.
The most straightforward way of improving the margin in this business involves the beginning of making your model, and thus eliminates the costs of suppliers like anthropic and an open.
The man said, “If you are not going to the model game, it’s a very expensive business to run.”
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But this idea comes with its own dangers. The man said that Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of the wind surf, finally decided to make his model-an expensive move.
In addition, the model makers are already competing directly. Anthropic offers cloud code and offers Openi Codex, for example.
Selling a business was a strategic move to lock in a high return, before its AI -supplied companies, including Open AI and Entropic, who were also entering the AI coding market.
Many people believe that the margin may face the same pressure on the wind surf, can affect any part, cursor, as well as lovers, duplicates and others like Veb coders.
“All ‘code -general’ products are either neutral or negative,” said Nicholas Charri, a wibk coding startup and a backed hosting solution, a small and medium -sized business (SMB) serving, said Nicholas Cherry. He added that he believes that the variable costs of all startups in this sector are very close, possibly within 10 % to 15 % of each other.
Unlike Wind Surf, the inferior is growing so fast that it intends to be an independent company, has already rejected the offerings, including openings reports.
And someone Announced in January That he is trying to make his model, which can give him more control over his expenses. In July, Startup Having two leaders from Anthropic’s Claude Code Team, information reported, but two weeks later, these employees Returned To work in anthropic.
In addition to creating a model, anyone can expect the cost of LLM to decrease over time.
“That’s the banking of everyone,” said Eric Nordlander, a general partner of Google Ventures. “Nowadays cost cost, it’s the most expensive ever.”
It is not completely clear how true it is. Instead of falling as expected, the price of some of the latest AI’s models has increased, as they use more time and computational resources to handle complex, multilateral tasks.
It is yet to be seen when it changes. On Thursday, for example, Openi introduced a new flagship model GPT5 with fees, which is significantly lower than its rival, Anthropic’s Claude Ops 4.1. And someone Immediately presented This model as a choice for cursor users.
Einsfire has also recently changed its pricing structure to transfer the growing costs of running the latest cloud model of Anthropic, especially its most active consumers. The move surprised some of the cursor users, as they did not expect additional charges on the upper part of the Pro Plan for $ 20 per month. Infir’s CEO Michael Trowell later apologized for unclear communication for changes in prices in one Blog Post.
It is a rock and a hard place. Investors say that although Cursor is one of the most famous applications of AI, which has reached 500 million millions in the Arr in June, the company’s user base cannot be so loyal to this product if another company develops a device that is superior to the cursor.
No one responded to a comment.
Given the landscape and costs of competitive land, the decision to exit wind surf may be understandable. After the expiry of the open contract, the founder and key employees left in an agreement to join Google, which paid $ 2.4 billion to key shareholders. The rest of the business then sold itself to the cognition.
Although many people, including the renowned VC, criticized Mohan for playing a role in about 200 200 employees in Google, a source familiar with the deal insisted that the acquisition actually maximized the results of all employees.
Beyond the cursor, other AI coding tools are included in the fastest growing startups of the LLM generation, such as duplicates, love, bolts and all of these model makers.
In addition, if this is a very popular business sector, which already produces hundreds of millions of income or more in the year, has difficulty making the top of the model makers, what can other, more newborns mean?