One is going to be valued at a much higher multiple than the other.
Startups love flashing ARR figures because "$300M ARR" sounds impressive, but without knowing churn rates, they might never actually collect that full amount.
JetBrains however collected real $400M in a year.
If jetbrains can combine there IDE technology with cursor technology, that would be ideal.
I think the problem is jetbrains tech is sort of already very biased in a certain direction and it's hard for them to pivot as fast into this new AI direction.
Just give them some time, they're not stupid. I'd drop Cursor in an instant once JetBrains catches up, because IntelliJ IDEs are just a way more powerful.
I prefer Claude Code still because it has access to more tools - Junie seems unable to fetch URLs and do other things. But that's a tiny gap that JetBrains can close quickly, and the Junie UI is quite pretty. Plus, inside the IDE they can equip the model with far more advanced tools than Claude Code will have from the CLI: inside Code Claude has to explore the codebase by banging stones together with ripgrep, whereas in the IDE it can be equipped with tools to access the indexes and navigate around like a human would.
In theory, JetBrains should be able to compete very strongly in this market. Their single line completion model is already excellent.
That's three good reasons to believe that lots of people will be cancelling in the next months unless something changes.
It's a nice improvement over the last edition, but still quite not "smart" as Cursor or Windsurf. The agent seems too shortsighted compared to competitors: it may stop looking for files or making edits sooner and you're left with code made with incomplete context (that does not work or just doesn't address your needs). It also does not fix linter/compiler errors from its own output code before finishing, unlike Cursor.
Achieving $300M ARR in 1 year is extremely extremely impressive regardless of churn or any other metrics really (assuming reasonable numbers). Being valued at $9B because of it doesn't seem out of line.
I'm skeptical of Cursor and not using Cursor myself. I actually use IntelliJ because I write Java.
Cursor's valuation is not unreasonable. But somehow you phrase it like $9B valuation for the fastest growing company that achieves the highest revenue per employee in the history of modern civilization is out of whack somehow.