The four co-founders of Anysphere, the company behind the AI Cursor tool, became billionaires under the age of 30 when they raised $2.3 billion in a new capital round on November 14.
Anysphere is currently valued at $29.3 billion. Forbes It is estimated that the founders including Michael Truell, Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif and Arvid Lunnemark have all become billionaires, when each holds 4.48% of the company’s shares, equivalent to about 1.31 billion USD.
The AI Cursor tool, launched in 2023, is a programming environment platform developed by Anysphere, aiming to turn the coding process into a “collaborative” experience between programmers and AI. This tool acts as an integrated development environment (IDE) combined with an advanced programming assistant in the form of Vibe Coding, capable of understanding project structure, suggesting contextual code, creating new features from natural descriptions and even fixing errors or optimizing entire modules as required.
According to many reviews, Cursor stands out thanks to its ability to allow AI to “go through” many files, analyze globally and perform complex tasks. Anysphere says the company positions Cursor as “the next step in the software development process, where repetitive work is automated and programmers focus on product design, architecture and quality testing.”
After just over two years of launch, Cursor achieved great success. On November 13, the Anysphere team said Cursor is used by millions of software developers, including those in about 50,000 teams at leading enterprises, such as Nvidia, Adobe, Uber, Shopify or PayPal. The latest annual recurring revenue (ARR) reached over a billion USD.
Anysphere founders from left to right: Aman Sanger, Arvid Lunnemark, Sualeh Asif and Michael Truell. Image: Anysphere
MIT students have many things in common
There is not much information about the co-founders’ birthdays. However, according to TechCrunchall four of them attended college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and graduated in 2022 with a major in Computer Science. Thereby, this site speculates that all four are around the age of 25-26 years old.
Theo FrederickTruell is the most prominent member and currently holds the position of CEO. His passion for technology began at an early age. Born and raised in San Francisco, California in a tech-savvy family in the US, Truell was exposed to computers and programming from a young age. By middle school, he was participating in programming complex projects, demonstrating his innate talent for software development.
At the age of 14, Truell created one of the world’s most popular programming games called Halite, which allows controlling a bot in many different programming languages. With thousands of users, the game is considered to not only demonstrate programming skills, but also demonstrate intuitive understanding to stimulate passion for coding.
During high school, Truell also participated and achieved excellent results at famous programming competitions in the US and around the world. In particular, he won a medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) thanks to his special problem-solving ability.
While studying at MIT, Truell had the opportunity to intern at drug discovery company Octant doing computational chemistry work, and Google working on training models for news recommendations. He also impressed Ali Partovi – one of Facebook’s early investors – by completing a hand-coding test in record time. He also participated in Neo, a startup training camp that specializes in discovering exceptional talent, while still in college. This is where he advised and connected him with Silicon Valley elites later.
Meanwhile, the second co-founder is Sualeh Asif, born and raised in Karachi (Pakistan) before moving to the US. On his personal blog, he said that he represented Pakistan at the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) in 2016 and 2018, both winning high prizes.
While studying at MIT, Asif had an internship at IBM, working on neural machine translation at IBM Watson Studio – a platform for developing and deploying AI applications in the field of machine learning and deep learning.
Third co-founder Arvid Lunnemark was born in Sweden. He also had remarkable achievements in high school, winning a silver medal at IOI in 2017 and an IMO gold medal in 2018, as well as interning at QuantCo, Stripe and Jane Street while in college.
The fourth co-founder is Aman Sanger, who has experience researching medical AI and participating in many technical projects at MIT. He also had time to intern at large technology companies in the US, and ran a technology business before founding Anysphere with a group of friends.
Pursue a distinct vision
Theo Tech Funding Newsmembers who knew each other at MIT, have been regularly discussing each other since 2020 after a number of papers on OpenAI’s “scaling laws” (iterative processes or models) pointed out that: the larger the model, the more data, the more performance increases according to predictable rules.
The team quickly realized a fundamental problem: while generative AI models like GPT are developing at breakneck speed, the tools programmers use every day like VS Code and JetBrains have not been properly built, or even developed from scratch to take advantage of the power of AI. Instead, they are merely “additional” AI add-ons, not “native”.
From there, the team decided to turn down job offers at large technology companies to pursue their own vision: building a code writer designed around AI, helping engineers “write, understand and debug” code faster. In the same year 2022, Anysphere was born.
“We’re obsessed with AI’s potential to change software development,” Truell told Frederick. “Tools like GitHub Copilot at that time were not enough to overcome the limit. We realized that AI should not only support programming, but also be the foundation for the way developers work.”
Initially, Anysphere mainly developed AI software for mechanical engineers when it realized that existing tools were extremely complex. The team thought they could build an “autocomplete” model in the mechanical field, but then realized things were tougher, and the field wasn’t right for them.
Programming is a much more crowded market and the team chose this path. Instead of building everything from scratch, which was a nearly impossible task, the team made an important technical decision: “fork” from Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VS Code).
VS Code is one of the most popular open source code editors in the world. By “forking” the tool, the team was able to retain all the features, plug-ins, and familiarity that millions of developers love. From there, the team focused all resources to deeply integrate AI into every aspect from editing code, “chatting” with the codebase to automatically debugging.
However, the team aimed to rebuild an AI engine from the ground up into a native AI development environment, leveraging the power of leading artificial intelligence models from OpenAI, or later Anthropic, Google and xAI. The goal is to create a platform that supports faster programming, fundamentally changing the way developers interact with code.
In early 2023, when ChatGPT was just exploding, Cursor was born in skepticism. Many people believe that AI cannot compare to human developers in understanding context and creating high-quality code. In addition, the tool also faces some competition from “big guys”, such as Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, Replit, Windsurf.
In the first few weeks, the product overcame skepticism as it quickly spread among programmers thanks to its superior performance compared to other AI-powered tools. Several developers from OpenAI, Midjourney and Perplexity have tried it and given it high praise, creating a significant word-of-mouth effect.
But throughout the summer of 2023, Cursor’s growth rate continuously decreased due to the lack of new features and the actual operation was not smooth. “At one point, we wondered if our mission was too ambitious,” Truell recalls.
By the end of 2023, Anysphere decided to launch two new features: guided editing capabilities and code base indexing (which can ask and answer any piece of code in the user’s code base). After that, Cursor market share gradually improved. This time, the company raised $8 million in the seed round.
In early 2024, Cursor had 30,000 daily active users. According to Business Dayup to this point, Anysphere has not yet hired any employees, showing the founding team’s ability to work tirelessly and the high level of creativity.
Theo TodayInAICursor achieved AAR from 1 million to 100 million USD in just 12 months without spending any money on marketing costs. For comparison, leading startups like Wiz took 18 months, Deel took 20 months or Ramp took up to 24 months to reach this milestone. The results also make Cursor the fastest-growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup in history.
In 2024, Anysphere consecutively conducted two Series A capital calls of 60 million USD, giving the company a valuation of about 400 million USD; Series B 100 million USD and valued at 2.5 – 2.6 billion USD. Earlier this year, the Series C round with 900 million USD was thereby valued at 9.9 billion USD. As of June, the company reached $500 million in ARR. This week, the founding team joined the billionaire club when raising capital of 2.3 billion USD, valued at 29.3 billion USD.
Despite achieving great success, the Anysphere team still works non-stop. Truell, as CEO, holds the “leader” of strategy and products, always emphasizing the vision “AI will write most of the world’s software” every time he appears before the media. Asif is the Chief Product Officer (CPO), serving as the team’s chief architect and internal voice, sharing a lot on the company blog. Lunnemark is a systems engineer who played a key role in the early days of development but is now stepping down from a permanent executive role at Anysphere. The other person is Sanger, who appears frequently on X, often sharing numbers about the level of product usage, for example Cursor is writing nearly a billion lines of code every day, accounting for a significant portion of the total amount of new code worldwide.