AI coding startup Cursor, courted by SpaceX, picks London as European hub

By Sam Tabahriti

LONDON, June 9 (Reuters) - AI coding startup Cursor, which SpaceX has an option to buy for $60 billion, will open its European headquarters in London and hire some 200 staff, an executive told Reuters, as demand in the region grows for tools that automate software development.

Elon Musk's SpaceX, which is readying for a closely watched IPO this week, said in April it had secured an option to either acquire code-generation startup Cursor for $60 billion later this year, or pay $10 billion for their new partnership, as it pushes deeper into the lucrative market for AI developer tools.

San Francisco-based Cursor chose London for its deep talent pool and access to multilingual workers, allowing the company to support multiple European markets from a single base, said Ismail Elmas, Cursor's senior vice president for EMEA.

London has Europe's largest concentration of tech talent, and second-largest globally after San Francisco. Cursor is planning to open other smaller offices in Paris, Munich, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Stockholm, Elmas said.

Cursor's business has scaled rapidly since its founding in 2022, with about $2.6 billion in annualised business-to-business revenue and enterprise sales growing sharply, according to company data shared with Reuters.

The company counts British Airways, BP, Nokia and Sanofi among its clients.

"Running the business out of the U.S. doesn't work. The European market has its own demands, and being in the region is important," Elmas said.

He added that the company was seeing increasing demand from customers to keep data within the region, particularly among regulated industries concerned about privacy and compliance.

Elmas declined to comment on the SpaceX option.

The company is targeting roughly 200 staff in the EMEA region by the end of the year, up from around 70 to 80 employees now.

Cursor's software allows users to generate code by describing applications in natural language, helping companies speed up development and modernise legacy systems, a shift the company says can significantly increase developer output.

Cursor competes with products such as Microsoft-owned GitHub Copilot and offerings from OpenAI and Google, positioning itself as a "model-agnostic" platform that lets customers choose between different AI systems.

(Reporting by Sam Tabahriti; Editing by Nia Williams)