Zed, the code editor
The Last Editor
2023-11-11 — 2026-09-29
Wherein a 42-Million-Dollar Fund Is Secured From Sequoia, the Atom Diaspora Eschews Embedded Browsers for the GPUI Framework, and AI Agents Are Accommodated Through the Proprietary Agent Client Protocol.
Some authors of Atom started work on another hype editor called Zed.
Zed comes out of the Atom diaspora. We have likely used their tooling even if we haven’t heard of it because the authors wrote so much that it ended up everywhere. One of the foudners, Max Brunsfeld, was also the author of tree-sitter, whose parser generator is used in many other code editors. The GPUI framework the Zed authors built as a side effect seems to be a kind of Rust UI lingua franca.
- Open-sourced in January 2024: GPL for the editor, AGPL for the server-side components, and Apache 2 for the GPUI.
- Windows in October 2025.
- A $32M Series B led by Sequoia in August 2025, taking the total to $42M.
- Version 1.0 in April 2026
- The profit model is something called Zed for Business.
1 Owning the stack
USP: they wrote everything themselves (“no borrowed foundations”). The implementation language is Rust, and it does not require weird embedded browser technology, so it is the opposite of Atom. UI-wise, Zed is organized like a video game both visually and procedurally, in terms of getting stuff onto the GPU ASAP.
Collab via CRDT-based multiplayer editing is a first-class feature. Hype tech underlying this includes the multi-agent-friendly DeltaDB sync engine which tracks changes at the character level, keeping consistency between many users. Generally, they have prioritized making space for agents as well as—or instead of—humans.
Zed wrote the Agent Client Protocol to standardize how agents interact with editors, and that protocol is everywhere now.
2 Extensibility
Extensions are Rust compiled to something called wasm32-wasip2, which sounds browserish to me. Supported targets are “languages, debuggers, themes, icon themes, snippets, MCP servers.” This excludes arbitrarily powerful and complicated extensions that render animations into the viewport or whatever but looks rather broad.
3 Ecosystem
Gram is a March 2026 fork that strips the AI features, the collab, and the telemetry to produce a lean, fast, native editor.1
GPUI, the Rust GUI infra, is only taking requests for Zed-relevant functionality atm.
Footnotes
Zed’s own riposte is that AI can be switched off in one line for users who want to stay close to the trunk build.↩︎