Michael Truell

Michael Truell is an American software engineer and entrepreneur.^[1] He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Cursor, an AI coding agent company.^[1][2][3]

Truell was born in New York City and studied at the Horace Mann School, where he met Aman Sanger, a future co-founder. During his early years, Truell developed an interest in programming and worked on improving reinforcement learning for simple robotic tasks.^[1][4] In 2016, he co-created the Halite AI Programming Competition, which served over 10,000 contestants across three seasons of competition.^[5][6] In 2017, he attended the Research Science Institute at MIT.^[7] Truell went on to earn a Bachelor of Science degree from MIT, majoring in computer science and mathematics.^[2] While at MIT, he did research on maximum likelihood estimation for Brownian motion tree models and worked at a biotech startup on computational chemistry.^[8]

In 2022, Truell co-founded Cursor with Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger and Arvid Lunnemark, whom he met while studying at MIT.^[9][10] Cursor is an artificial intelligence-assisted coding environment used for software development tasks.^[3] In 2024, the company raised $60 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.^[3][1] In November 2025, Cursor raised $2.3 billion in a funding round co-led by Accel and Coatue, increasing its valuation to approximately $29.3 billion.^[2][11]

Cursor has been reported to generate over $1 billion in annualized revenue and is used by companies such as Nvidia, Adobe, Uber, and Shopify.^[2][3] In 2026, SpaceX entered into an agreement with Cursor that provided an option to acquire the company for $60 billion, or alternatively to pay $10 billion for access to its technology and collaboration.^[12] SpaceX ultimately acquired the company in June in an all-stock deal, the largest venture-backed startup acquisition in history.^[13]