Michael Truell

He grew up in New York City and attended the Horace Mann School, a private prep school in the Bronx, and started coding at age 11 to make his own mobile games.⁠[1]

In May 2016 he and Joshua Gruenstein completed a paper on Fido, a universal robot control system combining Q-learning reinforcement learning with an artificial neural network that non-experts could train within minutes; the paper is marked as an ISEF 2016 Second in Category Award winner.⁠[2]

In October 2017 he and Benjamin SpectorBenjamin F SpectorBenjamin F Spector is a cofounder of Flapping Airplanes and researches machine-learning systems.Open the full entry published a paper setting out design principles for the multiplayer games of online programming competitions and a framework for the competition platform, presenting the 2016–17 Halite AI programming challenge as a successful example and noting Halite II, launched that month.⁠[3]

In July 2018 he co-wrote, with Two Sigma staff and others, an article on Halite II running on Google Cloud: over about three months it supported about 6,000 active players from about 100 countries and about 1,000 institutions.⁠[4]

He studied computer science and mathematics at MIT and has worked on statistical math research, LLM-driven recommendation systems and high-throughput drug pipelines.⁠[5]

At 18, after his first year at MIT, he took a summer internship at GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry; there he met Ali Partovi, who was recruiting for the Neo Scholars program, which Truell later joined, and Partovi became one of Cursor’s first investors.⁠[1]

In December 2021 he published a paper as first author with Jan-Christian Hütter, Chandler Squires, Piotr Zwiernik and Caroline Uhler on maximum likelihood estimation for Brownian motion tree models, often used in phylogenetics, from a single sample, including a polynomial-time algorithm.⁠[6]

In early 2022 he and his MIT classmates Aman SangerAman SangerAman Sanger is a co-founder of Cursor, an AI coding tool.Open the full entry, Sualeh AsifSualeh AsifSualeh Asif is one of the co-founders of Anysphere, the company that develops the AI code editor Cursor, and earlier represented Pakistan at the International Mathematical Olympiad.Open the full entry and Arvid LunnemarkArvid LunnemarkArvid Lunnemark is a Swedish software engineer and entrepreneur and an International Mathematical Olympiad gold medalist who in 2022 co-founded Anysphere, maker of the AI coding tool Cursor, with MIT classmates, and left the company in October 2025.Open the full entry founded Anysphere, later known by its product name Cursor, months before ChatGPT’s debut.⁠[7]

The four founders first tried to build AI models for computer-aided design software used by mechanical engineers; the effort failed for lack of domain expertise, and they pivoted to software engineering and built an AI code editor.⁠[8]

Anysphere released Cursor in March 2023; it was initially known for accurate code completion inside its own integrated development environment, and by that November Cursor had indexed 150,000 codebases.⁠[7]

In October 2023 Anysphere announced $8 million in seed funding led by the OpenAI Startup FundOpenAI Startup FundThe OpenAI Startup Fund is a venture fund set up by OpenAI in May 2021 with an initial $100 million from Microsoft and other partners to invest in early-stage AI companies. It had raised about $175 million by 2023, and control passed to Ian Hathaway in March 2024.Open the full entry, with participation from former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi and other angel investors, bringing its total funding to $11 million.⁠[9]

He appeared on episode 447 with Aman Sanger, Arvid Lunnemark and Sualeh Asif.⁠[10]

In November 2024 Benchmark, Index Ventures and existing investors Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry and Thrive, among others, made unsolicited offers valuing Anysphere at up to $2.5 billion; four months earlier it had raised a $60 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive at a $400 million valuation.⁠[11]

He announced on Cursor’s blog the acquisition of Supermaven, the AI coding assistant founded by Jacob Jackson, saying it would help launch a new version of the Tab model; the Supermaven team would focus on Cursor while its plugins remained maintained.⁠[12]

In January 2025 Anysphere raised $105 million in a round led by Thrive Capital with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and Benchmark, a sixfold increase in its valuation to $2.5 billion since its previous round; the company said it had $100 million in annual recurring revenue.⁠[13]

In June 2025 Anysphere raised $900 million at a $9.9 billion valuation in a round led by Thrive Capital with Andreessen Horowitz, Accel and DST GlobalDST GlobalDST Global is a technology investment firm founded by Yuri Milner in 2009 that focuses on growth-stage investments in internet companies worldwide; it has invested in companies including Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba, JD.com, Airbnb and Spotify, and in 2026 led the US$400 million Series B round of the AI visual content company Higgsfield.Open the full entry; earlier that year the company had turned down approaches from OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry and other potential buyers.⁠[14]

On June 16, 2025, Cursor changed its $20-a-month Pro plan from 500 fast requests to $20 of usage billed at API rates, and some users complained of unexpected charges; in July he apologized in a blog post, saying “we didn’t handle this pricing rollout well,” and the company planned refunds for users charged unexpectedly.⁠[15]

In July 2025 Anysphere struck a deal to acquire the AI customer relationship management startup Koala; several of Koala’s engineers joined a new Cursor team for enterprise readiness, while Koala’s own product was not integrated.⁠[16]

On October 29, 2025, Cursor released Cursor 2.0 with its first coding model, Composer, which it said was four times faster than similarly intelligent agent models; the new interface was centered on agents rather than files and let many agents run in parallel without interfering with each other.⁠[17]

In November 2025 Cursor raised $2.3 billion in a Series D at a $29.3 billion valuation, with existing investors Thrive, a16z, Accel and DST joined by newcomers CoatueCoatueCoatue is a technology- and innovation-focused investment management firm founded by Philippe Laffont in 1999, operating in both public and private markets. Its current website lists Thomas Laffont as co-founder and chief investment officer of private investments; a Form ADV filed on July 29, 2026, disclosed regulatory assets under management of $92,705,722,582.Open the full entry, Nvidia and Google. More than 300 people worked at its San Francisco headquarters, and annualized revenue exceeded $1 billion.⁠[18]

In December 2025 he said Cursor had automated roughly 80% of its internal employee support tickets with AI, and noted a University of Chicago study finding that senior engineers were more effective users of AI tools.⁠[19]

That month at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference he likened “vibe coding,” in which users do not look at the code, to adding floor after floor on shaky foundations, warning that for complex projects things “start to kind of crumble.”⁠[20]

In December 2025 Cursor announced the acquisition of the AI code review startup Graphite; as a Neo Scholar before starting Cursor, he had already met Graphite co-founders Merrill Lutsky, Greg Foster and Tomas Reimers.⁠[21]

In April 2026 SpaceX announced a deal with Cursor giving it the right to acquire the company later that year for $60 billion or to pay $10 billion for their work together; he wrote on X: “Excited to partner with the SpaceX team to scale up Composer.”⁠[22]

On June 16, 2026, SpaceX disclosed in an SEC filing a $60 billion all-stock merger agreement with Anysphere and its subsidiary X67; Anysphere shareholders were to receive SpaceX Class A stock based on the average price over the seven trading days before closing, with completion expected in the third quarter of 2026 pending regulatory approval.⁠[23]

On August 14, 2026, Cursor announced that SpaceX had completed its acquisition; Cursor said it would have access to the world’s largest GPU fleet, allowing it to offer customers higher-performance models at a lower cost, and called Grok 4.6, released that week, an early example of what the two could achieve together.⁠[24]

As of October 2026, his personal website said he was building SpaceXAI to advance useful AI.⁠[5]

Personal website: Public link: https://mntruell.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[5]

X: Public account: https://x.com/mntruell (opens in a new window)⁠[5]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-t-5b1bbb122/ (opens in a new window)⁠[5]

Cursor: Official website: https://cursor.com (opens in a new window)⁠[24]