AI coding assistant Cursor has acquired Graphite, a five-year-old startup specializing in AI-powered code review and debugging. The terms of the transaction were kept private, although Axios reported that Cursor paid an amount greater than Graphite's $290 million valuation from its $52 million Series B earlier this year.

AI-generated code is not free from bugs. In fact, there is increasing evidence that AI-generated code is more error-prone than code written by humans. As Graphite CEO Merrill Lutsky explained, tools like Cursor now enable engineers to build features in hours instead of days, but buggier AI-generated code means that the speed at which humans can perform code review is fast becoming an important limiting factor when developing software. As a result, leading companies, including Shopify, Snowflake, and Figma, already use Graphite's platform to review and merge code at AI-generation speeds.

Graphite will continue operating independently, as both teams work on developing the best strategy to connect both products. In the same announcement confirming the acquisition, Lutsky shared that Graphite has big plans for the coming months, including enhancing Graphite's AI features with support from Cursor's expertise on coding models and building the most powerful AI code reviewer in the market by drawing from the strengths of both Graphite’s AI Reviewer and Cursor’s Bugbot

Graphite is Cursor's latest acquisition following purchases of recruiting firm Growth by Design and AI-CRM startup Koala.