Cursor’s 25-year-old CEO Michael Truell helped take the AI coding firm from a school ardour challenge to a possible $60 billion acquisition by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
On Tuesday, SpaceX introduced in a submit on X that Cursor gave SpaceX the precise to amass the corporate later this 12 months for $60 billion. If SpaceX doesn’t purchase Cursor, it can pay $10 billion for his or her work collectively, the corporate mentioned.
Both method, it’s an enormous win for Truell, who only a few years after dropping out of MIT is price an estimated $1.3 billion, based on Forbes. His and Cursor’s fast rise is amongst Silicon Valley’s largest success tales.
Who’s Michael Truell?
Truell grew up in New York Metropolis and attended the Horace Mann College, a personal prep faculty within the Bronx. He’d at all times had an curiosity in expertise, and began coding at age 11 to make his personal cell video games, he instructed Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle.
By age 18, Truell had simply wrapped up his first 12 months at MIT and was finishing a summer season internship at Google. Throughout this time, he labored on “language models for feed ranking,” based on his profile on LinkedIn.
Truell met Ali Partovi, an early investor in Fb and Airbnb, throughout his internship, as Partovi was recruiting for his Neo Students program, an accelerator for younger tech expertise. Truell instantly impressed him by finishing a written coding take a look at “in record time,” Forbes reported. After he left that assembly, Partovi put a star with a circle subsequent to his title on a listing of potential Neo Scholar candidates, that means “he was so impressed that he’d invest in any project Truell pursued,” based on Forbes.
Truell later grew to become a Neo Scholar, certainly one of solely 30 chosen annually. When he began Cursor, Partovi grew to become one of many firm’s first buyers.
How Truell based Cursor
Truell and his MIT classmates Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark have been fascinated by AI earlier than OpenAI modified the trade by launching ChatGPT in 2022. A 12 months earlier than that, the Cursor cofounders have been enthusiastic about what they need to do in AI, Truell mentioned in an interview at Y Combinator’s AI Startup College in San Francisco final June.
“In 2021 we were trying to figure out what we do with that interest,” he mentioned. “Do we go and work on AI in academia? Or, you know, do we go join, you know, a big existing AI effort? Or do we start our own thing?”
By 2022, they’d their reply. Truell and his cofounders have been obsessive about Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, which launched for particular person builders in 2022. However this system had its limits, they discovered, and may very well be improved.
At first, the cofounders targeted on what Truell described as a “copilot for mechanical engineers” partly as a result of he mentioned it might be a distinct segment house that was “sleepy and uncompetitive,” he mentioned through the interview with Y Combinator. Two of Truell’s cofounders have been additionally engaged on a message encryption challenge on the identical time.
It wasn’t till about six months later the group pivoted into AI coding, which Truell mentioned at first they’d averted “because we thought it was too competitive.” However the group was determined after their first couple of concepts did not get off the bottom, he mentioned.
Plus, “we realized we were really inherently excited about the future of coding,” he mentioned through the Y Combinator interview.
That keenness propelled Truell and his cofounders to one of many quickest upward trajectories within the historical past of Silicon Valley startups. The corporate’s valuation has skyrocketed virtually as quick as AI’s capabilities have improved. Cursor raised an preliminary $60 million funding spherical in June 2024. By the tip of 2025, it had raised three extra funding rounds that introduced in $3.3 billion, skyrocketing its valuation from $2.5 billion to $30 billion in a single 12 months.
The corporate has grown even sooner than some huge tech names with related fast rises. Slack took two-and-a-half years to achieve $100 million in annualized income, whereas Dropbox took 4 years to cross the identical mark. Cursor hit the $100 million annualized income milestone in January 2025, round one 12 months and eight months after it launched its first product in early 2023. Its annualized income crossed $2 billion in February, based on Fortune.
Cursor is a coding assistant with its personal Built-in Growth Surroundings, or IDE, the place the corporate’s AI is built-in. At its most simple stage, Cursor’s AI capabilities let customers code extra rapidly by always working to foretell the code a consumer is prone to write subsequent. With the launch of Cursor 3 earlier this month, the corporate has improved on its agentic coding, through which AI can write code by itself with broad consumer steerage—a transfer to compete with Anthropic’s Claude Code, which launched simply over a 12 months in the past however already has gained reputation with programmers.
Cursor has greater than 300 workers, and 67% of Fortune 500 corporations use the corporate’s expertise, Fortune reported. Some well-known corporations that use Cursor embrace Salesforce, Samsung, and Budweiser, based on the corporate’s web site.
Earlier than the SpaceX announcement Tuesday, the corporate was in talks to boost one other spherical at a $50 billion valuation TechCrunch reported. Now, it might be acquired for $10 billion greater than that. For context, the corporate was in talks to boost funding at practically a $10 billion valuation a 12 months in the past, based on Bloomberg.
Finally, what might have made Cursor a hit the place the founders’ different tasks failed was a easy choice: to go all in.
“We had a ton of conviction about that and we had a ton of excitement about that and so at some point we just decided to go for it,” Truell mentioned.
