Who is Aman Sanger, the 25-year-old desi selling his company, Cursor, to SpaceX for $60 billion? – Firstpost
You know you have made it in the world of tech when Elon Musk’s company is looking to buy you out. Ask Aman Sanger, the Indian-American 25-year-old whose company, Cursor, is being bought by SpaceX for a whopping $60 billion.
On Tuesday, the Elon Musk-led company formally agreed to buy the AI coding platform Cursor, just days after SpaceX made a blockbuster public debut that boosted its market cap past $2.5 trillion. According to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, SpaceX will acquire Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, Inc, which will become a wholly owned subsidiary of the rocket company. The Elon Musk-led firm said it expects to close the merger by the third quarter of 2026.
The announcement has sparked interest in the four founding members of Cursor — Aman Sanger, Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark. As this deal makes headlines, we take a closer look at who exactly the brains behind Cursor are and what makes this AI coding platform special.
The life and times of Aman Sanger
Brought up in New York, Sanger’s family has strong Indian roots. The 25-year-old’s father, Arvind Sanger, is an alumnus of IIT Bombay and a hedge fund professional. His mother, Shilpa Sanger, is an orthodontist and an entrepreneur. She also sits on the board of Pratham USA, a not-for-profit focused on education.
An avid squash player, Sanger started coding at the age of 14. It is reported that Sanger’s early interest in programming and artificial intelligence pushed him toward an entrepreneurial path.
His love for computers led him to get admission at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he met Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark, who later became co-founders of Anysphere Inc, the company behind Cursor.
Notably, Sanger and Truell, who now serve as the CEO of the company, were selected as Neo Scholars, a programme that identifies promising technical talent and connects them with leading Silicon Valley founders and investors.
A Forbes report also states that before his time at Cursor, Sanger interned at hedge fund Bridgewater Associates and Google. He also founded his own AI consultancy firm.
The rise and rise of Cursor
It was in 2022 that Sanger, along with Truell, Asif, and Lunnemark, came together to put their shared knowledge of developer tools and machine learning together. Their vision was simple: instead of building another chatbot, create an AI tool that could work directly inside a programmer’s workflow and help write, edit, and understand software code.
According to a Forbes report, initially the Cursor co-founders started by building AI models for computer-aided design programmes used by mechanical engineers. However, that project failed because of their lack of expertise in the field. So they decided to pivot to something they knew better — software engineering. They went on to build their AI-powered code editor, or a “Google docs for programmers,” Truell told Forbes last year.
Today, Cursor is an AI-powered coding platform that helps developers write, edit, and understand code more efficiently. What makes it different is that, unlike traditional tools that mainly offer autocomplete, Cursor acts like an intelligent assistant. Cursor can analyse entire codebases, suggest improvements, and even generate complex solutions.
And that’s what has made Cursor a huge winner in its field. It is used by millions of software developers, including those on some 50,000 teams at companies like Nvidia, Adobe, Uber, Shopify and PayPal. Sanger’s firm says its products are used by 64 per cent of Fortune 500 companies, and that its tools write more than 100 million lines of code a day for enterprise customers.
Last November, Cursor reached a $29.3 billion valuation, after raising $2.3 billion in a funding round co-led by VC heavyweights Accel and Coatue. Additionally, a recent report stated that the company has more than $1 billion in annualised revenue.
Interestingly, many credit Cursor for the idea of
vibe coding — a word that gained so much attention that Collins Dictionary selected it as its word of the year for 2025.
All in all, the SpaceX deal with Cursor is yet another example of Indian excellence in the field of technology and AI. For Sanger, it’s a proud moment — from teenage coder to billionaire founder in just a few years.
With inputs from agencies
