Partnering with Zed: The AI-Powered Code Editor Built from Scratch
Sequoia by Sonya Huang and James Flynn
Sequoia is leading Zed’s Series B. The fast code editor is betting that AI-era coding still needs a better IDE.
Based on reporting by Sequoia, by Sonya Huang and James Flynn — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Sequoia says it is leading Zed’s Series B, a fresh vote of confidence for a code editor that was built from scratch in Rust and now says it has 150,000 active developers using it each month.
That user base matters because switching IDEs is notoriously hard. Zed is trying anyway, and it has made its pitch around speed, lightness and extensibility rather than the bloat that often comes with older developer tools. The company also says collaboration is baked into the product, not bolted on later. That includes working with other humans, and now with AI agents too.
The team behind Zed knows the terrain well. Nathan Sobo, Antonio Scandurra and Max Brunsfeld previously worked on Atom at GitHub, an editor that helped shape the rise of VS Code and the Electron framework behind apps like Slack, Discord and Notion. Now they’re trying to go one level deeper and rebuild the editor stack they once helped define.
There are signs the bet is landing. Zed says it is the editor of choice for names like Mike Bostock, Mitchell Hashimoto and Solomon Hykes, and that Anthropic, Linear, Ramp and Shopify are among the teams using it. The company points to a jump in Rust developer adoption to 9% from 1% a year earlier, according to the State of Rust Survey, and says it is the second most popular AI IDE by usage in State of AI 2025.
The real hook is DeltaDB, Zed’s open-source sync engine. It records every code operation, which Zed says enables character-level permalinks and real-time collaboration between humans and AI agents. That is not a small feature list; it’s a statement about where coding tools are headed, and a wager that the editor still matters even as terminal tools and web-based agents keep pulling work in different directions.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Zed looks smart because it isn’t pretending the future is one tool or one interface. The cleanest read here is simple: AI is making old editors feel tired, and the answer is not another fork with a new coat of paint. Rebuilding from scratch is painful, but so is living inside someone else’s leftovers.
Read more about this at: Sequoia
