Inside Cursor’s scrappy plan to win Southeast Asian developers

Aris Setiawan started using AI coding tool Cursor in September 2024. By May 2025, the Indonesia-based freelance developer decided to host an online event to introduce vibe coding to fellow developers.

Vibe coding is a term for AI-assisted coding that was coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy.

Seeing a strong demand for such events, Setiawan reached out to Cursor to host a sponsored meetup in the city of Surabaya the following month. The startup agreed, and in July, Setiawan received approval to join the firm as its ambassador.

Michael Truell, co-founder and CEO of Cursor (right), at a Stripe event. / Photo courtesy of Stripe

In Singapore that same month, about 500 people attended Cursor’s first official meetup in the city-state, which was hosted by Grab.

“They told us (the organizers) it was the largest in-person meetup they’ve had globally, and this includes places like San Francisco, New York, and even India,” Cursor ambassador Sherry Jiang recalls.

Prior to the event, Jiang had been running her own vibe coding bootcamp, Code with AI, for nearly a year. A chat with Cursor’s community lead Ben Lang got her the gig to coordinate the meetup with Grab and an offer to join the ambassador program.

Setiawan’s and Jiang’s stories reflect how Cursor is growing across Southeast Asia. The AI coding tool, developed by US-based Anysphere, isn’t using typical marketing campaigns to expand. Instead, it’s tapping into developers who want to share what they’ve learned.

As of June, Cursor has generated US$500 million in annualized revenue.

Coding parties

In March 2025, Y Combinator reported that a quarter of startups in its winter 2025 batch had codebases that were 95% AI-generated – a strong signal that more startups are using AI to build the next big thing.

In Southeast Asia, this shift is driven by grassroots meetups that feel more like coding parties than corporate events. That’s not to say big companies aren’t interested.

Grab, for instance, lets its engineers demo how they use Cursor to migrate the company’s payment infrastructure.

See also: Ex-Googlers take AI offline for billions of devices across Asia

“Grab literally showed us their code. I definitely took some pictures,” Jiang, who vibe-coded AI financial planner app Peek, tells Tech in Asia. “How often do you see the codebase of these companies?”

Impact on startups

Keeping the momentum