Pakistani-American Entrepreneur's AI Startup Commands $18 Billion Valuation

Anysphere, founded in 2022 by Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, Aman Sanger and Michael Truell, has been approached by investors about a deal that would more than double its valuation in a new funding round to $18 to $20 billion, according to Bloomberg. Sualeh Asif, 25, the Chief Product Officer and co-founder, hails from Karachi, Pakistan.  He studied at Nixor College in Karachi before going to the United States in 2018. He met the other three co-founders while studying at the Massachusetts  Institute of Technology (MIT). One-half (Sualeh Asif and Aman Sanger) of the startup’s founding team is of South Asian origin. The company moved to San Francisco soon after its founding in 2022. 

Sualeh Asif, Anyshphere Inc's Pakistani-American Founder

Anysphere’s lead product is an AI code editor called Cursor AI.  It works as an AI assistant that writes code and also anticipates code developer's needs, identifies inefficiencies, and helps solve complex problems with relative ease. On his personal website sualehasif.me, Sualeh says: "I’m building Cursor to discover a new way to write code. I owe much of my fun to my friends and MIT. I am extremely excited about the new capabilities of LLMs and applications to code tools". 

In early 2024, Anywhere raised $60 million in a Series A financing (co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital and included Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe) at a $400 million post-money valuation, according to TechCrunch. It was followed by a $105 million Series B funding round in December 2024. Earlier this month, Anysphere said it raised $900 million at a valuation of $9.9 billion, including the new investment, in a round led by Thrive Capital. Andreessen Horowitz, Accel and DST Global also participated. 

Several investors have recently floated a funding offer that would value Anysphere at $18 billion to $20 billion, according to Bloomberg.  The startup's revenue has recently surpassed $500 million on an annualized basis. 

“We have not engaged with or spoken with any investors about financing since our Series C,” Chief Executive Officer Michael Truell wrote to Bloomberg in response to a query. “We’re not focused on fundraising and have lots to do on building the technology, product, and team. Cursor can be made much more useful, and we’re spending time on that.”


Comments

Amber H. said…
I use Cursor every day now. This is a huge accomplishment!

I have developed in Kotlin, Java and Ruby using Cursor AI. It appears to support the most popular languages, I have not yet encountered a language it does not know. I asked it which languages it knows and it included Python and Prolog in the list. When prompted to solve a specific problem, Cursor will read through the code and reason about the solution by itself and make the code changes on your file system. It can then proceed to compile and run unit tests and programs. When it encounters build errors, it will try to fix them by itself. Through prompts, you can give it feedback to help it iterate on an acceptable solution. It can also write unit tests for your code by itself and take feedback. I asked it about its abilities to debug with Python and Prolog. It told me that it does not support interactive debugging specifically.

Python Debugging Support:

What Cursor AI can do:
Code analysis: Identify syntax errors, logical issues, and potential bugs through static analysis
Error explanation: Explain error messages and suggest fixes
Code review: Point out common programming mistakes and anti-patterns
Refactoring suggestions: Propose improvements to make code more robust
Test generation: Help create test cases to catch bugs

What it cannot do:
Runtime debugging: Cannot step through code execution, set breakpoints, or inspect variables at runtime
Interactive debugging: No debugger integration like pdb, ipdb, or IDE debuggers
Memory inspection: Cannot examine memory state or call stack during execution

I got a similar answer regarding its Prolog debugging abilities.

It is designed to be very similar to VSCode, a popular code editor for programmers. It uses all the same keyboard shortcuts. It is not necessarily like IntelliJ which does support runtime debugging for Java.
June 22, 2025 at 10:09 AM
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