New Delhi, June 17 (IANS) SpaceX has signed a merger deal for $60 billion in stock to acquire Anysphere Inc. — the parent of AI coding platform Cursor — a move that has made its cofounder Aman Sanger (25) worth an estimated $5.5 billion.

Sanger — who left Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2022 with three classmates to build what became Cursor — serves as chief operating officer at Anysphere. On LinkedIn, Sanger describes his mission as “removing all bottlenecks in creating software”.

The startup pivoted from an initial focus on building an AI copilot for the mechanical engineering industry to an AI‑assisted coding platform that can analyse entire codebases and generate complex solutions, multiple reports said.

Sanger, born in New York, began coding at 14 and met cofounders Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif and Arvid Lunnemark at MIT, where he studied computer science. Within Anysphere, Truell serves as CEO and Asif leads product, while Sanger has overseen product strategy, distribution and community building.

Cursor crossed $1 billion in annualised revenue in November 2025 and had made about $4 billion in annualised revenue by early June 2026.

Millions of software developers at roughly 50,000 enterprises such as Nvidia, Adobe, Uber, Shopify, and PayPal use Cursor to generate and edit code.

Reacting to SpaceX’s acquisition announcement on X, Sanger posted: “Excited to train some very strong models!”, while SpaceX expects to close the merger by Q3 2026.

The acquisition announcement comes four days after SpaceX’s record‑breaking Nasdaq initial public offering (IPO). On the stock market debut day, SpaceX became the sixth-highest valued public company in the world.

The shares ended the debut day at $160.95, giving SpaceX a market capitalisation of about $2.2 trillion after its first day of trading, turning the rocket maker’s founder Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.

—IANS

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