The cofounders of popular AI coding tool Cursor are now billionaires after the company announced it has raised $2.3 billion in a fresh round of fundraising, valuing their startup Anysphere at $29.3 billion. Forbes estimates that founders Michael Truell, Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif and Arvid Lunnemark each hold a 4.5% stake in the company worth at least $1.3 billion.
Anysphere did not respond to Forbes’ request for comment by press time.
AI code editing software Cursor, which is Anysphere’s only product, is used by millions of software developers including those on some 50,000 teams at enterprises like Nvidia, Adobe, Uber, Shopify and PayPal. The company has more than $1 billion in annualized revenue, it announced Thursday.
The startup was founded in 2022 by four friends who met at MIT. All four founders, Forbes 30 Under 30 alumni, are under the age of 30. Since its founding, the startup has raised a total of $3.38 billion from storied VC firms like Accel, Thrive Capital, Coatue, Andreessen Horowitz and DST Global. Earlier this year, Anysphere became one of the fastest growing startups after its annual recurring revenue grew from $1 million in 2023 to $100 million in about 12 months.
Cofounder Lunnemark, 26, left the company in October 2025 to start his own startup called Integrous Research focused on developing systems for “safer AI”, according to its incorporation documents. Lunnemark did not respond to Forbes’ request for comment.
AI coding tool Cursor allows engineers to use AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI to write and edit entire chunks of code as well as identify and fix bugs. In October, Cursor also launched its own model called Composer that was trained to generate code faster and automatically carry out tasks like editing files and codebases. Running its own model could help reduce its reliance on companies developing the underlying third-party models, which are extremely costly.
Truell, the 25-year-old CEO, started coding at a young age. In high school he created a programming game called Halite, where thousands of players controlled a bot using different coding languages. He then went on to intern at drug discovery company Octant where he worked on computational chemistry, and Google, where he trained models for news recommendations. After impressing early Facebook investor Ali Partovi by completing a handwritten coding test in record time, he became a Neo scholar, a startup boot camp that spots exceptional talent while they’re still in college, mentors and connects them with Silicon Valley elite and invests in their companies. Cofounder Sanger, 25, was also a Neo scholar. Asif, 25 years old and originally from Karachi, Pakistan, competed in the International Math Olympiad and Lunnemark was also a former math Olympiad champion.
The Cursor cofounders initially started by building AI models for computer-aided design programs used by mechanical engineers, a project that failed because of their lack of expertise in the field. So they decided to pivot to something they knew better— software engineering. They went on to build their AI-powered code editor, or a “Google docs for programmers,” Truell told Forbes last year.
As AI startups reach sky high valuations really quickly, more and more young AI founders are becoming billionaires. In late October, the 22-year-old founders of $10 billion-valued AI recruiting startup Mercor became the world’s youngest billionaires, Forbes reported.
Phoebe Liu contributed reporting.
Read the full article here
