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, Anysphere 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
Riaz Haq said…
The Void IDE, Open-Source Alternative to Cursor, Released in Beta

https://www.infoq.com/news/2025/06/void-ide-beta-release/

A new open-source AI-powered code editor, Void IDE, was recently released in beta, positioning itself as a privacy-focused and free alternative to popular closed-source AI editors like Cursor and GitHub Copilot. Backed by Y Combinator, Void IDE is a fork of Visual Studio Code. While Microsoft recently announced plans to open Source its GitHub Copilot Chat Extensionpossibly in a few months, the beta release is available now for the community to fiddle with.

The primary motivation behind Void IDE is to address concerns surrounding the privacy and cost associated with proprietary AI coding tools. Closed-source editors may require sending private code data through their backends, raising privacy issues and leading to ongoing subscription costs. While the backend may often keep only embeddings computed from the code, the original code may sometimes be recoverable. As the authors of the paper Mitigating Privacy Risks in LLM Embeddings from Embedding Inversion explain:

The surge in popularity of embedding vector databases in LLMs has been accompanied by significant concerns about privacy leakage. Embedding vector databases are particularly vulnerable to embedding inversion attacks, where adversaries can exploit the embeddings to reverse-engineer and extract sensitive information from the original text data.

Void IDE aims to provide options for keeping developers in control of their data. Void IDE can leverage various Large Language Models (LLMs), supporting direct integrations with services like Claude, GPT, and Gemini, as well as local model hosting via Ollama. This ensures that AI processing can happen locally or via direct API calls, avoiding a third-party middleman.

Void IDE offers a range of AI-centric features familiar to users of tools like Cursor. These include inline code editing, contextual AI chat, and code generation. The editor also features advanced capabilities like file system awareness for codebase-wide context and the ability to view/edit the underlying prompts sent to the AI.

Being a fork from VS Code, Void IDE is able to let its users migrate their themes, key bindings, and settings.

Developers on Hacker News and Reddit expressed interest, particularly regarding its open-source nature and privacy stance. Discussions include comparisons to other AI coding tools and editors. Some developers expressed skepticism about the proliferation of VS Code forks, with others asking why not use an extension instead. The project is actively developed, with the team encouraging contributions from the community to shape its future roadmap.
June 22, 2025 at 4:20 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pakistani Women's Growing Particpation in Workforce

Image
While Fareed Zakaria, Nick Kristoff and other talking heads are still stuck on the old stereotypes of Muslim women, the status of women in Muslim societies is rapidly changing, and there is a silent social revolution taking place with rising number of women joining the workforce and moving up the corporate ladder in Pakistan. "More of them(women) than ever are finding employment, doing everything from pumping gasoline and serving burgers at McDonald’s to running major corporations", says a report in the latest edition of Businessweek magazine . Beyond company or government employment, there are a number of NGOs focused on encouraging self-employment and entrepreneurship among Pakistani women by offering skills training and microfinancing . Kashf Foundation led by a woman CEO and BRAC are among such NGOs. They all report that the success and repayment rate among female borrowers is significantly higher than among male borrowers. In rural Sindh, the PPP-led govern...
Read more

Pakistan Among World's Largest Food Producing Countries

Image
Pakistan's agriculture output is the 10th largest in the world. The country produces large and growing quantities of cereals, meat, milk, fruits and vegetables. Currently, Pakistan produces about 38 million tons of cereals (mainly wheat, rice and corn), 17 million tons of fruits and vegetables, 70 million tons of sugarcane, 60 million tons of milk and 4.5 million tons of meat.  Total value of the nation's agricultural output exceeds $50 billion.  Improving agriculture inputs and modernizing value chains can help the farm sector become much more productive to serve both domestic and export markets.   Top 10 Countries by Agriculture Output. Source: FAO Pakistan has about 36 million hectares of land under cultivation. Wheat and rice are grown on more than half of it. Fruits and vegetables each account for only about 3% of the cultivable land.  Since year 2001, the country's cereal production, mainly wheat, corn and rice, has grown about 45% to  38 million tons...
Read more

Digital Pakistan 2022: Broadband Penetration Soars to 90% of 15+ Population

Image
The year 2022 was a very rough year for Pakistan. The nation was hit by devastating floods that badly affected tens of millions of people. Macroeconomic indicators took a nose dive as political instability reached new heights. In the middle of such bad news, Pakistan saw installation of thousands of kilometers of new  fiber optic  cable, inauguration of a new high bandwidth  PEACE  submarine cable connecting Karachi with Africa and Europe, and millions of new broadband subscriptions. Broadband penetration among 140 million (59% of 236 million population) Pakistanis in  the15-64 years age group reached almost 90%. This new digital infrastructure helped grow technology adoption in the country.  Internet and Mobile Phone Banking Growth in 2021-22. Source: State Bank of Pakistan Fintech:  Mobile phone banking and internet banking grew by 141.1% to Rs. 11.9 trillion while Internet banking jumped 81.1% to reach Rs10.2 trillion.  E-commerce tra...
Read more