JetBrains Net Loss: Financing Hit, Not AI Spend, Drove 2025 Red

A loss that looks worse than it is

JetBrains, the Prague-based maker of IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm and Kotlin, closed 2025 with record revenue of CZK 16,008 million, up 6.3%. It also posted a net loss of CZK 315 million, the first in filings going back to 2005, according to statutory accounts compiled by Helgi Library 4. That pairing invited a dramatic interpretation: an incumbent IDE vendor bleeding money while trying to catch up in AI. One widely shared post put it bluntly, claiming JetBrains "lost $14M chasing AI" while Cursor reached $4B in annual recurring revenue, and declaring that "the terminal won" 5.

The accounts support a narrower reading. JetBrains still made money from operations. Operating profit (EBIT) was roughly CZK 751 million. The swing to red came from net financing costs of CZK 1,078 million, compared with a financing gain of CZK 810 million the year before 4. In other words, a turnaround of nearly CZK 1.9 billion on the financial line erased an operating profit that was still positive. The filings do not break down that line in detail. Financing results of this kind often reflect currency and investment revaluations rather than product strategy, but that is an inference, not something the numbers prove. JetBrains also ended the year with CZK 7,584 million in net cash, which is not the balance sheet of a distressed company 4.

The real warning sign: margins

That does not mean the business is untouched by the AI shift. The more telling figures sit above the operating line. EBITDA fell to CZK 918 million, a 5.7% margin. Gross margin has dropped to 10.7%, down from 53.7% in 2021, even though revenue grew every year in between 4.

Commenters on Hacker News reached similar conclusions in different ways. One pointed to staff expenses rising 34.2% against 6% revenue growth. The same commenter flagged a sharp increase in cash outflow from investing, reading it as a sign that the company is staffing up and spending heavily on something 3. Others suspected that rising cost of services reflects inference and token costs for AI features. A more skeptical voice said too many people were treating a single line item as proof of decline, noting that total assets grew even as net income fell 3.

The AI spending is real. JetBrains has embedded its Junie coding agent across its IDEs and says it has 343,000 users. It has also launched Air, a standalone agentic environment, and open-sourced a coding model called Mellum 5. The company says its AI tools passed six figures of active paid users in Q4 2025 4. Air, released in March 2026, lets developers guide and review agents instead of writing code directly. It supports Codex, Claude, Gemini CLI and Junie through the Agent Client Protocol, and includes team-coordination and governance layers 5.

Warp's terminal bet

While JetBrains moves from the IDE toward agents, Warp is coming from the opposite direction: out of the terminal. Founded in 2020 by Zach Lloyd, a former Google principal engineer who worked on Google Docs, Warp raised a $23 million Series A in April 2022 led by GV with Figma's Dylan Field. It followed with a $50 million Series B in June 2023 led by Sequoia. Both rounds came while the company was essentially pre-revenue 2. Its angel investors included Sam Altman, Marc Benioff, Tobi Lütke and Jeff Weiner, bringing total funding to about $73 million 1.

For years Warp had a large free user base and no real business model. After it repositioned as an agentic development environment, that changed quickly. It took 300 days to reach its first $1 million in ARR, and it is now reportedly adding $1 million every 10 days 2. The current product, Warp 2.0, runs multiple long-running agents that edit code, execute commands and manage workflows at the same time. It was open-sourced in April 2026 1. Monetization is freemium: the core terminal is free, AI and collaboration features sit behind tiered subscriptions, and a separate usage-based product, Warp Factories, charges per agent run 1.

The terminal is clearly contested ground. Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's rebuilt Codex CLI and Google's Gemini CLI all run agents directly from the command line, with no IDE required 5.

The reading

The "JetBrains collapsed chasing AI" story overstates the case. The net loss came mostly from the financing line, and the company remains cash-rich. The structural concern is the long slide in gross margin, which suggests that serving AI features costs more than the company is currently earning from them.

It is notable that JetBrains and Warp now use the same label, "Agentic Development Environment," for their flagship products 15. That convergence suggests the contest is no longer IDE versus terminal. The question is who can run agents profitably. Warp's revenue curve shows demand exists. JetBrains' margins show how expensive meeting that demand can be.