When SpaceX announced this week that it was acquiring Cursor, the AI coding tool that has taken Silicon Valley by storm, the spotlight, predictably, fell on CEO Michael Truell. But standing alongside him, now a billionaire at 25, is Aman Sanger - a quietly formidable co-founder whose story is as much about the immigrant dream as it is about artificial intelligence.
Sanger is an Indian American who was raised in New York while his family has strong Indian roots. His is not the story of a Silicon Valley insider born into tech royalty. It is the story of a second-generation immigrant who grew up watching his parents build something from nothing, and decided he would too.
A family shaped by India
To understand Aman Sanger, you have to understand where he comes from. His father, Arvind Sanger, moved to the US with an IIT Bombay degree and pursued an MBA at Tulane University. He founded Geosphere Capital in 2007, a New York-based hedge fund focused on natural resources, industrial companies, and Indian equities. He also served as Chairman of Pratham USA, a nonprofit organisation that supports educational opportunities for underprivileged children in India.
His mother, Shilpa Sanger, grew up in a Marwari family in Mumbai, trained as an orthodontist, and later moved to the USA. She describes herself as an 'orthodontist turned homemaker turned entrepreneur turned angel investor.'
The couple met while studying in New York and married after about 18 months of dating. They have two children, Aman and his sister. That household, one shaped by finance, medicine, entrepreneurship, and a deep commitment to education, gave Sanger an unusually broad foundation before he ever set foot on a university campus.
MIT, squash, and a startup
Aman Sanger started coding at the age of 14. He went on to major in Computer Science and AI at MIT. Outside the classroom, he was an avid squash player and remained active in campus athletics while pursuing his studies.
It was at MIT that he met Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark, three classmates who shared an obsession with what AI could do for software development. The four were interested in AI before OpenAI changed the industry by launching ChatGPT in 2022. Rather than wait to graduate, they made the call that would define their lives - drop out and build.
In 2022, the four launched Anysphere with a vision to use AI to transform how software is built. Their breakthrough came with Cursor, an AI-powered coding assistant that helps developers write, edit, and debug code using simple natural-language prompts.
The startup that outran everyone
What followed was one of the most remarkable growth trajectories in the history of enterprise software. Cursor hit the $100 million annualised revenue milestone in January 2025, around one year and eight months after it launched its first product. Slack took two and a half years to reach the same mark. Dropbox took four years.
Since its founding just four years ago, Anysphere raised $3.4 billion from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, Accel and Coatue, and was most recently valued at roughly $30 billion in November 2025. Today, Cursor's technology is used by 67 percent of Fortune 500 companies, including major names such as Salesforce, Samsung, and Budweiser.
A $60 billion outcome
SpaceX confirmed that Cursor will become a wholly owned subsidiary upon closing the deal in the third quarter of 2026. For Sanger, the outcome is staggering. He owned a 4.5 percent stake in Cursor, matching the ownership held by each of the company's other co-founders. His net worth is currently estimated at approximately $1.3 billion, according to Forbes.
SpaceX's acquisition is expected to make each of Cursor's co-founders worth $2.7 billion, taking Aman Sanger's net worth to an estimated $5.5 billion once the deal closes.
