Zed is a high-performance, AI-first code editor written in Rust by Zed Industries, the company founded by Nathan Sobo, Antonio Scandurra, and Max Brunsfeld — key members of the team behind Atom and Tree-sitter. The project was announced in 2023 after Atom was discontinued, and reached version 1.0 in April 2026, marking its move from preview into a stable, production-ready editor for Linux, macOS, and Windows.
The editor is built on a custom GPU-accelerated UI framework called GPUI and is designed from the ground up for multi-core performance, real-time collaboration, and native AI integration. Zed supports parallel agents, the open-weight Zeta2 edit-prediction model, and a flexible runtime that plugs into Claude, GPT, Gemini, MCP servers, and external CLI agents like Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode through the open Agent Client Protocol (ACP). Multiplayer coding sessions let teams pair, mob, or review live in the same editor.
Funding has been deliberately lean. Public reporting indicates total funding of roughly $16.6 million through 2023, followed by a $32 million round from Sequoia Capital in 2025 to fund the 1.0 release and the broader agent platform. The core editor remains open source under Apache 2.0 and free for personal use, with a Pro plan at $10 per month for unlimited AI edit predictions and additional capacity for agentic features.
Zed competes with VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, Cursor, and Windsurf. Its differentiation rests on native Rust performance, an opinionated take on AI-native editing, and an open protocol stance through ACP and MCP rather than a single proprietary AI stack.