According to Forbes, the four cofounders of AI coding tool Cursor are now billionaires after their company Anysphere raised $2.3 billion in fresh funding, valuing the startup at a staggering $29.3 billion. Michael Truell, Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif and Arvid Lunnemark each hold 4.48% stakes worth at least $1.31 billion, and all four founders are still under 30 years old. The company announced it has over $1 billion in annualized revenue and serves millions of developers across 50,000 teams at companies like Nvidia, Adobe, Uber, Shopify and PayPal. Cursor became one of the fastest growing startups after its annual recurring revenue exploded from $1 million in 2023 to $100 million in about 12 months. Since its 2022 founding, Anysphere has raised a total of $3.38 billion from top VC firms including Accel, Thrive Capital, Coatue, Andreessen Horowitz and DST Global.
Generational Wealth Shift
Here’s the thing that really stands out: we’re witnessing the fastest wealth creation in tech history, and it’s happening to people who were literally in college just a few years ago. These four MIT friends built a billion-dollar company in basically two years. And they’re not alone – Forbes just reported that 22-year-old founders of AI recruiting startup Mercor also became billionaires recently. It’s creating this weird dynamic where people who haven’t even hit 30 are making more money than most Fortune 500 CEOs will see in their entire careers. The traditional career ladder? Basically irrelevant now if you’re building in AI.
Pivot To Success
What’s fascinating is that Cursor wasn’t even their original idea. They initially tried building AI models for mechanical engineering CAD programs and failed because they didn’t know that domain well enough. So they pivoted to what they actually understood – software engineering – and built what the CEO called “Google docs for programmers.” That’s the real lesson here: sometimes the billion-dollar idea isn’t your first one, it’s the one that plays to your actual strengths. They went from failure to billionaires by focusing on a problem they personally experienced as coders.
AI Code Wars
Now the real question is: can they maintain this insane momentum? Cursor’s currently relying on third-party AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI, which they admit are “extremely costly.” That’s why they launched their own model called Composer in October – to reduce that dependency. But building competitive AI models is incredibly expensive and resource-intensive. They’re basically trying to out-innovate the very companies whose technology they’re currently using. It’s a high-stakes game where the infrastructure costs could eat into those impressive revenue numbers pretty quickly.
Founder Dynamics
Interesting side note: cofounder Arvid Lunnemark actually left the company in October 2025 to start his own AI safety startup. He’s still a billionaire from his stake, but it raises questions about founder retention at these hyper-growth companies. When you make life-changing money this quickly, what keeps you motivated? For some, it seems the answer is starting the next thing rather than scaling the current one. Meanwhile, the remaining founders come from seriously impressive backgrounds – math Olympiad champions, Neo scholars, early coding prodigies. They’re basically the dream team of technical talent.
