Around the Horn: December 21-28

Three major acquisitions closed in seven days. OpenAI issued an internal "code red." And Copilot closed much of the gap with Cursor at half the price.

If you're closing year-end planning, this week compressed three quarters of vendor movement into seven days. Procurement, security review, and developer-experience decisions just got entangled.

The Acquisition Wave Accelerates Consolidation

Cursor acquired code review startup Graphite on December 19 for "way over" its $290 million Series B valuation. The deal combined cash and stock, with Cursor CEO Michael Truell framing the rationale directly: "The manner in which engineering teams assess code is increasingly becoming a hindrance to their ability to accelerate as AI is more widely utilized."

The strategic logic is clear. AI coding tools accelerated code generation dramatically over 2.5 ye...