Cursor vs OpenAI: Revenue, Profit and Business Model
Cursor reported $4B of revenue in FY2026 and — of net income. OpenAI reported $20B of revenue in FY2025 and — of net income.
Latest financial snapshot
Financial summary
Cursor
Cursor never published audited financials as a private company, so its numbers come from company statements and reporting. Annualized revenue reached about $100 million in January 2025, $500 million by June 2025, more than $1 billion by November 2025, $2 billion in February 2026, $3 billion in late April 2026 and more than $4 billion in early June 2026 (Forbes). The company said enterprise revenue tripled in Q1 2026 versus Q4 2025. Funding rounds included an $8 million seed (2023), a $60 million Series A at $400 million (2024), a $900 million Series C at $9.9 billion (June 2025) and a $2.3 billion Series D at $29.3 billion (November 2025). SpaceX's $60 billion all-stock price converted Anysphere shares into 389,289,254 SpaceX Class A shares. Profitability has not been disclosed.
OpenAI
OpenAI reports revenue as annualized run rate rather than audited GAAP figures. The company says it reached $1 billion of revenue within a year of launching ChatGPT, was generating about $1 billion per quarter by the end of 2024, and passed $20 billion of annualized revenue by the end of 2025. Axios reported the run rate was nearing $70 billion at the end of September 2026. Funding has scaled alongside: $110 billion announced in February 2026 at a $730 billion pre-money valuation grew to $122 billion committed at $852 billion post-money by March 31, 2026, anchored by Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank. An employee tender of about $7 billion followed in August 2026 at the same valuation. The company remains unprofitable because compute spending outpaces revenue.
Revenue and profit by year
Cursor
| Year | Revenue | Net income | Margin | Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2026 | $4B | — | 0.0% | +300.0% | Source |
| FY2025 | $1B | — | 0.0% | — | Source |
OpenAI
| Year | Revenue | Net income | Margin | Growth | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | $20B | — | 0.0% | +400.0% | Source |
| FY2024 | $4B | — | 0.0% | +100.0% | Source |
| FY2023 | $2B | — | 0.0% | — | Source |
Where the revenue comes from
Cursor
- Business and enterprise subscriptions
~75% (mid-2026, company-stated)
Per-seat Teams and Enterprise contracts plus usage above included allowances.
- Individual subscriptions and usage~25%
Pro and higher individual tiers, plus pay-as-you-go model usage beyond plan limits.
OpenAI
- ChatGPT SubscriptionsMajor
Consumer, team, business, education, and enterprise subscriptions.
- API UsageMajor
Usage-based developer and enterprise model access through OpenAI APIs.
- Enterprise PlatformGrowing
Business deployments, governance, custom workflows, and platform services.
- Partnerships and LicensingEmerging
Strategic licensing, infrastructure partnerships, commerce, and outcome-based AI workflows.
Business model and strategy
Cursor
How it makes money
Cursor makes money from subscriptions. A free Hobby tier lets developers try the editor and agent with limited usage. Paid individual plans (Pro at $20 a month, with higher-usage tiers above it) include a monthly allowance of frontier-model usage, and heavy users pay for extra usage at model API rates.
Growth strategy
Cursor grew bottom-up: developers adopted it on their own, then companies bought team licenses. It now focuses on enterprise sales, with business customers making up about three-quarters of revenue by mid-2026. Product expansion moved from the editor into background and cloud agents, a command-line agent, web and mobile access, Bugbot code review and the Graphite code-review platform it acquired in December 2025.
Competitive advantage
Cursor owns the whole editor rather than running as a plugin, so it can design agent workflows, inline diffs, Tab predictions and codebase indexing into the product directly. It has trained its own models (Cursor Tab and the Composer family) for the high-frequency parts of coding, which lowers cost and latency.
OpenAI
How it makes money
OpenAI earns revenue in three main ways. First, ChatGPT subscriptions: consumer tiers such as Plus and Pro, plus Business, Enterprise and Edu seats sold to organizations. Second, the API platform, where developers and companies pay per token to build OpenAI models (GPT, reasoning, image, audio and embeddings) into their own software.
Growth strategy
OpenAI is growing on four fronts: selling ChatGPT and Codex into enterprises, turning ChatGPT into a broader 'super app' with agents, shopping and apps inside the chat, building its own compute through the Stargate data center program and chip partnerships, and moving into hardware through the 2025 acquisition of Jony Ive's io.
Competitive advantage
OpenAI's advantage is distribution plus scale. ChatGPT is the most widely used AI assistant, with OpenAI citing more than 900 million weekly users in February 2026, which gives it a direct consumer channel that rivals have to buy or build.
Questions about Cursor vs OpenAI
Which company has higher revenue — Anysphere Inc. (Cursor) or OpenAI?
Anysphere Inc. (Cursor) reported $4.0B (FY2026), while OpenAI reported $20.0B (FY2025). By last reported revenue, OpenAI is the larger business, with Anysphere Inc. (Cursor) reporting a smaller revenue base. Note: these are from different fiscal years and are not a direct like-for-like comparison.
Which is more financially efficient — Anysphere Inc. (Cursor) or OpenAI?
Anysphere Inc. (Cursor) generates $13.33M / employee in revenue per employee, while OpenAI generates $4.44M / employee. Anysphere Inc. (Cursor) shows higher revenue efficiency per headcount, though this reflects business model differences — capital-light software companies routinely outperform labour-intensive manufacturers on this metric.
How do Anysphere Inc. (Cursor) and OpenAI make money?
Anysphere Inc. (Cursor) and OpenAI generate revenue in fundamentally different ways. Anysphere Inc. (Cursor): Cursor makes money from subscriptions. OpenAI: OpenAI earns revenue in three main ways.
Is Anysphere Inc. (Cursor) bigger than OpenAI?
By last reported revenue, OpenAI ($20.0B (FY2025)) is the larger company compared to Anysphere Inc. (Cursor) ($4.0B (FY2026)). Revenue scale is one dimension of size — market capitalisation, employee count, and geographic reach are also relevant depending on the context.
Figures come from each company's filings and the sources linked beside them. Amounts reported in another currency are shown in US dollars at an approximate rate and marked with ~. Back to the Cursor vs OpenAI overview