Cursor is buying Graphite. They met at Neo six years ago. 💙
When I heard that Cursor is acquiring Graphite, my mind flashed back six years to when we brought together the young leaders who later founded both companies.
I met Merrill Lutsky, Greg Foster, and Tomas Reimers over the course of a week in January 2020 that we spent side-by-side with MIT student Michael Truell (now Cursor CEO).
The setting was Costanoa resort on the California coast, which we converted into Neo Startup Camp: a workspace and retreat for aspiring founders. We hosted dozens of entrepreneurial students and recent grads to spend a week working alongside each other without any transactional expectation.
Graphite was born shortly after this event, and we invested in them from the start. Most other participants, including Michael, were still in college — he didn’t start Cursor until years later. A few other attendees are now crushing it as leading engineers at Cursor.
I still remember spending 1:1 time with each of these young people before their companies existed. It has been the privilege and honor of my career to work with such brilliant people. I love seeing their success. It’s what motivates us to keep doing what we do at Neo.
Today’s news is a win for many. My heartfelt congrats go to the teams at both companies. Besides the founders, congrats in particular to the Neo Scholars who joined Graphite: Taksh Singh, Peter Stakoun, and Lambert Liu. It’s a win for investors like Neo (we backed both startups since inception). Above all, it’s a win for customers: I can’t wait till software engineers can use Graphite’s leading code-review capabilities integrated into Cursor’s leading AI-coding platform.