4 MIT graduates who built the popular AI coding tool Cursor become billionaires

By Phong Ngo November 18, 2025 | 11:25 pm PT

Four MIT alumni behind the widely used AI coding tool Cursor have become billionaires following a new $2.3 billion fundraising round that pushed their startup, Anysphere, to a valuation of $29.3 billion

After the Nov. 13 fundraising round, Forbes estimates that Michael Truell, Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark each hold a 4.5% stake in the company worth at least $1.3 billion.

Founded in 2022 Cursor is the sole product of Anysphere, used by millions of software developers including Nvidia, Adobe, Uber, Shopify and PayPal. The firm announced Thursday that its annualized revenue has surpassed $1 billion.

Truell told Bloomberg earlier this year that the company's success is due to "the value" Cursor brings to software developers. The tool, which generates code based on prompts, a practice known as "vibe coding", also functions as a spell checker, automatically correcting code errors, according to Entrepreneur magazine.

Cursor’s cofounders Aman Sanger, Arvid Lunnemark, Sualeh Asif and Michael Truell (left to right). Photo from X

In an October interview with CNBC, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called Cursor his "favorite enterprise AI service," and Google CEO Sundar Pichai praised the tool in June, revealing he used it to help vibe-code a webpage.

The four cofounders met while attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lunnemark, 26, left the company in October 2025 to start his own venture, Integrous Research, focused on developing safer AI systems.

Truell, the 25-year-old CEO, began coding at a young age. He interned at drug discovery company Octant and later trained recommendation models at Google. Truell then became a Neo scholar, a startup boot camp that identifies exceptional talent and connects it with Silicon Valley elites, after excelling in a handwritten coding test.

Sanger, also 25, was also a Neo scholar. Asif, 25, a math whiz from Karachi, Pakistan, competed in the International Math Olympiad.

The rise of Cursor's cofounders follows the success of other young entrepreneurs in the AI sector. Last month, the three 22-year-old cofounders of AI recruiting startup Mercor became the youngest self-made billionaires after securing $350 million in funding, valuing their company at $10 billion.