Sualeh Asif, a Pakistani-born co-founder of the AI coding platform Cursor, is set to become a billionaire after SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition of Anysphere, the company behind the tool.
Asif, born and raised in Karachi, now serves as Chief Product Officer at Anysphere and owns roughly 4.5% of the company alongside fellow co-founder Aman Sanger, a stake Forbes estimates will be worth approximately $2.7 billion once the deal closes.
Asif’s path to Silicon Valley began with mathematics. A recognized math prodigy in Pakistan, he represented the country at the International Mathematical Olympiad for three consecutive years from 2016 to 2018, winning a bronze medal during that span. The achievement earned him a scholarship to MIT, where he spent over three years working as a research assistant before co-founding Cursor in 2022 alongside Aman Sanger, Michael Truell, and Arvid Lunnemark. At MIT, Asif’s focus centered on building the core systems behind Cursor’s AI coding engine, the technology that allows developers to describe what they want in plain language while the system generates working code, fixes bugs, and suggests improvements.
Co-founder Aman Sanger, 25, comes from an Indian immigrant family and grew up in the United States. His father, Arvind Sanger, graduated from IIT Bombay before founding Geosphere Capital, a global investment fund, while his mother Shilpa Sanger works as an orthodontist and angel investor. Sanger began programming at age 14 and met his future co-founders at MIT, where he and Truell were both selected as Neo Scholars, a program connecting promising young talent with Silicon Valley founders and investors. Before launching Cursor, Sanger interned at Bridgewater Associates, Google, and You.com while running his own AI consultancy on the side.
Cursor’s rise has been rapid by any measure. Founded in 2022, the company reached a $29.3 billion valuation and surpassed $3 billion in annual recurring revenue by early 2026, transforming from a four-person MIT startup into one of the most valuable AI companies in the world within four years. SpaceX’s acquisition of Anysphere, confirmed in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, is expected to close by the third quarter of 2026, with each of Cursor’s four co-founders, Sanger, Asif, Truell, and Lunnemark, projected to be worth roughly $2.7 billion once the transaction completes.
For Pakistan, Asif’s story carries particular significance. While South Asian founders have increasingly featured in Silicon Valley’s upper ranks, a Karachi-educated entrepreneur reaching billionaire status through a homegrown technical achievement, rather than relocating early in life, stands out as a distinctly Pakistani success story within the broader narrative of the country’s representation in frontier AI.
