JetBrains Net Loss: Why AI Coding Agents Cost It $14M in 2025
A Record Year That Ended in the Red
JetBrains, the Czech-founded maker of IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm and a long list of other developer tools, has reported the first net loss in its history. The company finished 2025 roughly $14 million in the red, even as revenue reached a record $710 million 1. For a business long admired for growing profitably without outside capital, that is a notable break from the past. It also says a lot about how fast the market for coding tools is changing.
Neither of these numbers points to a company in freefall. Revenue went up, not down. What changed is spending. JetBrains put its margin into a wave of AI products meant to keep it relevant as developers move toward AI-native workflows 2.
Where the Money Went
The investment covered three main efforts. Junie, JetBrains' coding agent, is now built into all of its IDEs and reportedly has about 343,000 users 2. JetBrains Air is a standalone agentic development environment 2. Mellum is a coding model the company has open-sourced 2.
The competition explains the urgency. Cursor, the AI-first editor built on a fork of VS Code, has reportedly reached $4 billion in annualized recurring revenue 2. Measured against that, JetBrains' $14 million loss looks like the price of staying in the race. One analysis describes the loss as the real cost of competing with Cursor 1.
Two Readings of the Same Loss
The two main interpretations agree on the numbers but disagree on what the numbers mean.
The first treats this as a fight among IDEs. In this view, AI-powered editors like Cursor are beating traditional IDEs, and JetBrains is spending heavily to catch up 1.
The second goes further. It argues that the IDE itself is becoming less central, and that the terminal has "won" 2. The evidence offered is a group of agentic command-line tools:
- Claude Code works entirely in the terminal. It reads a full repository, plans multi-step changes, runs shell commands, edits files and repeats test cycles without an IDE open 2.
- OpenAI's Codex CLI has been rebuilt as a full-screen terminal interface. It supports managing parallel agents, voice input, and controlling sessions from a phone 2.
- Google's Gemini CLI runs locally and comes with what is described as the most generous free tier available 2.
If this second reading is correct, JetBrains faces a harder problem than out-building Cursor. It has to answer whether developers will need a rich editor at all once agents do most of the typing.
JetBrains' Answer: Become the Control Room
JetBrains' March 2026 launch of Air suggests the company is taking the second reading seriously. Air is pitched as an "Agentic Development Environment" in which developers don't write code directly. Instead, they direct agents and review the results 2.
The more interesting choice is that Air is not limited to JetBrains' own technology. Through the Agent Client Protocol, it supports outside agents such as Codex, Claude and Gemini CLI alongside Junie 2. The product has three layers [2]:
- Air in JetBrains IDEs, which orchestrates agents inside the editor.
- Air Teams, which coordinates work between humans and agents.
- Air Governance, which handles policy, auditability and cost management.
This is a sensible hedge. If JetBrains cannot win the contest to build the best model or agent, it can try to become the neutral layer where many agents are managed, supervised and governed. The governance layer in particular points to enterprise buyers. For those customers, auditability and cost control can matter as much as raw coding speed.
What It Means
The "IDE era is ending" framing is probably overstated. A company that just posted record revenue still has a large, paying user base, and many developers still work in a full editor every day. Even so, the loss is a real signal. AI has raised the cost of staying competitive in developer tools, and well-funded rivals are setting a fast pace.
JetBrains' bet is that agents will multiply and that teams will need somewhere to coordinate and oversee them. That is a coherent strategy. Its success depends on whether developers and enterprises want an orchestration layer from an IDE vendor, or whether the terminal-native tools from AI labs absorb that role themselves. The 2025 loss buys JetBrains a chance to find out. The next few years of results will show whether it was an investment or the first sign of decline.
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