Aman Sanger was one of four MIT students experimenting with the possibilities of artificial intelligence when he helped establish Anysphere in 2022. Four years later, the company behind AI coding platform Cursor has agreed to be acquired by Elon Musk's SpaceX in a deal valued at $60 billion.
The transaction has turned the 25-year-old Indian-origin entrepreneur and his three co-founders into some of the technology industry's youngest billionaires. But the path to the deal began long before SpaceX entered the picture, with an attempt to answer a simple question about how artificial intelligence could change the work of software developers.
Sanger founded Anysphere with Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif and Arvid Lunnemark, whom he met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The group initially explored several applications for artificial intelligence, including computer-aided design.
Their focus eventually shifted to software development.
At the time, AI tools were becoming increasingly useful to programmers, but using them often meant moving between a code editor and a separate chatbot. The founders saw an opportunity to bring artificial intelligence directly into the programming environment.
The platform was designed to do more than suggest individual lines of code. It could work with larger sections of a codebase, allowing developers to use natural-language instructions to generate, modify and troubleshoot software.
The approach helped position Cursor within the growing “vibe coding” movement, in which programmers increasingly describe what they want to build while AI handles a larger part of the technical process.
The idea quickly found an audience as companies began adopting AI tools across their engineering operations.
According to Outlook Business, Cursor is now used by tens of thousands of teams, including engineering organisations at Nvidia, Adobe, Uber, Shopify and PayPal. The company has also said that its technology is used across 64% of Fortune 500 companies.
As Cursor's adoption expanded, so did Anysphere's valuation. The company raised $2.3 billion in a major funding round that valued it at approximately $29.3 billion.
For Aman Sanger, who now serves as Anysphere's chief operating officer, the company's rapid growth transformed an experiment among four young engineers into one of the most valuable businesses in AI software.
Before founding Anysphere, Sanger had worked at Bridgewater Associates and Google and had also explored AI through his own consulting venture. According to Outlook Business, his father, Arvind Sanger, is an IIT Bombay alumnus who later worked in the hedge fund industry, while his mother, Shilpa Sanger, is an orthodontist and entrepreneur.
Cursor's rise eventually brought it into SpaceX's orbit.
The two companies had already begun working together before the acquisition. In April 2026, they announced a broader arrangement under which SpaceX had the option of acquiring Cursor for $60 billion or pursuing a $10 billion partnership instead.
According to a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing cited by Outlook Business, Anysphere will become a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX, while Cursor shareholders will receive SpaceX Class A stock based on the deal's implied $60 billion equity value.
