Cursor quietly acquires Continue, an open-source alternative to GitHub Copilot

The AI developer tools consolidation continues apace, with news that Cursor has snapped up open-source coding assistant Continue — its latest acquisition in a busy 18 months.

The deal itself seems to have been completed around the same time SpaceX confirmed it was doling out $60 billion for Cursor, meaning that Elon Musk’s rocket juggernaut is now the owner of Continue as well.

Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed and, in truth, there hasn’t been much of an announcement to speak of. Around June 16, Continue updated its homepage with a brief message stating that it has been bought by Cursor, and an accompanying FAQ explaining that existing users have until July 15 to export their data before it’s deleted, and that recurring billing has been disabled.

Continue, it seems, has been discontinued.

Confirmation also arrived via online reports from developers who received emails from Continue about their accounts, and via LinkedIn, where Matthaus Krzykowski — an angel investor in Continue through Angel Invest and a long-time collaborator via his data pipeline company dltHub — posted a personal tribute to the founding team, which includes Ty Dunn and Nate Sesti.

Krzykowski says that he’s tracked Dunn’s career since 2019, when he was the first product manager at Berlin-based conversational AI company Rasa. Dunn went on to become a founding engineer at dltHub in 2022 before leaving the following year to co-found Continue with Sesti. For Krzykowski, the conventional wisdom that GitHub Copilot had already sewn up the market was wide of the mark — the developer experience was still badly broken.

“2023 was still very early days of coding agents – yet most investors thought GitHub Copilot had already won.”

“2023 was still very early days of coding agents — yet most investors thought GitHub Copilot had already won,” Krzykowski writes. “Back then, developers were stuck copy-pasting from ChatGPT and guessing what context Copilot used to make a suggestion. It was obvious there had to be a better way. Backing Ty and Nate was easy – I often bet on the people I’ve watched build up close.”

The open-source alternative

A graduate of Y Combinator’s Summer 2023 cohort, Continue positioned itself as the open-source alternative to the proprietary coding assistants flooding the market. Available as a VS Code extension, JetBrains plugin, and CLI, it let developers connect any AI model of their choosing and pull in context from their own tools — Jira, Confluence, and such like — to build customized coding assistants tailored to their specific environment.

The data control angle was central to the pitch — in a market dominated by closed-source tools that developers had little visibility into, Continue was positioning itself as the transparent alternative. Speaking to TechCrunch in early 2025 to mark the startup’s $3 million seed round, Dunn spelled out what that meant.

“When you use Continue, you get to keep your data,” Dunn said at the time. “As an organization, you can pool all of your data for all of your developers in one place. That is not possible in the one-size-fits-all, black box code assistant, where their SaaS offerings and strategy is to take your data and use it to improve it for everyone.”

Fast-forward 16 months, and that same startup has now been absorbed by one of the best-known proprietary players in AI coding tools. By the time of its acquisition, Continue had accumulated 34,300 GitHub stars and 4,800 forks, and raised in the region of $5 million. The team pushed a final 2.0.0 release before closing up shop — removing telemetry and tidying the code, designed as part of a deliberate handoff to the community. Under its Apache 2.0 license, the codebase remains publicly available for anyone to fork and build on.

Cursor’s quiet consolidation

The Continue acquisition is one of two Cursor-related stories that appear to have been buried beneath the big-bucks SpaceX news. At the same time, Cursor unveiled Origin at its Compile developer conference — an agent-native challenger to GitHub for code hosting and collaboration that similarly flew under the radar.

Moreover, it’s the latest move in what has become a steady acquisition drumbeat for Cursor over the past 18 months, including AI coding assistant Supermaven and code review startup Graphite. Unlike Graphite, which has continued to operate as an independent product, the Continue deal has the hallmarks of an acqui-hire — the product appears to have been shuttered, with little public information on who from the Continue team will be making the move to Cursor.

According to Krzykowski, co-founder Nate Sesti is joining Cursor. Dunn’s LinkedIn profile, meanwhile, suggests he departed Continue in May, a few weeks before the acquisition was made public, and it’s not clear whether he will be making the move to Cursor. Chad Metcalf, who replaced Dunn as CEO in April 2025, hasn’t made any public announcement about his next move. Two of Continue’s founding engineers, Dallin Romney and Patrick Erichsen, have joined OpenClaw — the open-source AI agent that went viral earlier this year before its creator joined OpenAI — as members of technical staff.

The New Stack has reached out to both Cursor and Continue for comment and will update this piece if or when we hear back.