Exclusive: Cursor acquires code review startup Graphite as AI coding competition heats up

Cursor is buying code review startup Graphite in a deal that brings together two popular tools in AI-powered software development.

The companies declined to disclose financial terms of the transaction, but said it involves a mixture of cash and equity. They said Graphite will continue operating as an independent product, but with deeper integration into Cursor’s code editing platform. The deal is expected to close in the coming weeks.

Cursor CEO, Michael Truell, told Fortune the acquisition addresses what he sees as an emerging bottleneck in software development.

“The way engineering teams review code is increasingly becoming a bottleneck to them moving even faster as AI has been deployed more broadly within engineering teams,” he said. “Over the past 2.5 years, Cursor has made it much faster to write production code. However, for most engineering teams, reviewing code looks the same as it did three years ago. It’s becoming a larger portion of people’s time as the time to write code shrinks. Graphite has done lots of work to improve the speed and accuracy of code review.”

AI code editors like Cursor help programmers while they’re writing code—making suggestions, explaining the function of a particular piece of code, and helping teams move around large projects faster. Graphite, used by companies like Shopify, Snowflake, and Figma, helps teams review changes and decide when code is ready to ship, after it’s written.