AI startup Cursor with Pakistani co-founder set for $60bn deal with SpaceX
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Cursor, an AI code-generation startup co-founded by Pakistani-born Sualeh Asif, has secured a $60 billion acquisition deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, according to multiple reports on Thursday.
Along with OpenAI and Anthropic, Cursor is one of several Silicon Valley startups that have drawn waves of developers by using artificial intelligence to automate coding, a business where AI companies have found early commercial traction, according to Reuters.
SpaceX announced in a post on X that Cursor gave SpaceX the right to acquire the company later this year for $60 billion. If SpaceX doesn’t buy Cursor, it will pay $10 billion for their work together, the company said.
“The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world’s most useful models,” it added.
Originally from Karachi, Asif attended Nixor College before attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and represented the country in the International Math Olympiad from 2016 to 2018.
While there, he cofounded Anysphere, the maker of the popular AI code editing tool Cursor, with three friends from MIT.
The company now claims to have more than $1bn in annualised revenue, making it one of the fastest growing AI startups according to Forbes.
In MIT, he started an AI-powered search engine company.
Umar Saif, the former federal minister for IT, praised the co-founder, calling him “the kind of role [model] Pakistani youth needs”.
“Not property dealers, tax evaders, bank defaulters, rent seekers, born into wealth etc. But a self-made kid from a middle-class family in Karachi,” he pointed out.
“Studied at MIT, started a hugely impactful company, changed the way people write code, now worth over $1 billion at the age of 26!”
Cursor reached a $29.3bn valuation in November 2025, after raising $2.3bn in a funding round co-led by VC heavyweights Accel and Coatue.
Today, millions of software developers at 50,000 enterprises like Nvidia, Adobe, Uber and Shopify use Cursor to generate and edit chunks of code, according to Forbes.
