London is betting big on AI. Cursor, the San Francisco-based startup that SpaceX has an option to acquire for $60 billion, will open its European headquarters in London and hire roughly 200 staff, an executive told Reuters.
The company chose London for its deep talent pool and access to multilingual workers, allowing it 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. Smaller offices are planned for Paris, Munich, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Stockholm.
Cursor's business has scaled rapidly since its founding in 2022, generating about $2.6 billion in annualized business-to-business revenue, with enterprise sales growing sharply. 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 customers increasingly want data kept within the region, particularly regulated industries concerned about privacy and compliance.
Cursor competes with Microsoft-owned GitHub Copilot, OpenAI and Google, positioning itself as a "model-agnostic" platform that lets customers choose between different AI systems.