How Young Indian Entrepreneur Aman Sanger Secured a Major Deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX

Aman Sanger, an Indian-origin entrepreneur, has attracted massive attention since Elon Musk's SpaceX agreed to acquire his AI coding platform Cursor in an all-stock deal valuing the company at $60 billion.

The young entrepreneur comes from a family with strong Indian roots: his father, Arvind Sanger, is an IIT Bombay alumnus who built a career in hedge funds, while his mother, Shilpa Sanger, is an orthodontist and entrepreneur and board member of Pratham USA, the education nonprofit.

Sanger is one of the four co-founders of Anysphere Inc., the company behind Cursor. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he met his three co-founders, Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif and Arvind Lunnemark.

What is Cursor?

Before Cursor, Sanger previously worked at Bridgewater Associates and Google and also operated his own AI consulting firm. The real bet came in 2002, when the four launched Anyphere with a deceptively simple thesis. AI tools that sit inside a developer's workflow rather than alongside it.

An initial exploration of using AI for computer-aided design was set aside, the emphasis shifted to software engineering, and this ultimately led to the creation of Cursor.

Unlike typical coding assistants, Cursor is designed to analyse and reason over entire codebases, enabling it to generate code, detect bugs, and manage tasks sophisticated enough to require genuine programming expertise.

Cursor now accounts for more than 50,000 teams, including engineering organisations at NVIDIA, Adobe, Uber, Shopify and PayPal. The company also claims its tools are used across 64% of Fortune 500 firms, generating up to 100 million lines of code per day.

Cursor's Growth and Investor Interest

Last year, Anysphere raised $2.3 billion in a funding round that valued the company at about $29.3 billion, making it one of the fastest valuation run-ups for a software start-up.

The platform also became strongly linked to "vibe coding," a method of creating software using natural language prompts instead of writing instructions line-by-line.

According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, SpaceX, through its merger subsidiary X67 Inc., will absorb Anysphere as a wholly owned subsidiary, with Cursor's shareholders converted into SpaceX Class A stock based on the $60 billion implied equity value.