Sualeh Asif: From Pakistani Math Olympian to Steering $10B Cursor Startup

Sualeh Asif, a co‑founder of Anysphere and CPO of the AI-driven coding tool Cursor, brings his Pakistani background and mathematical talents to one of today’s fastest‑growing tech ventures. A 25-year-old former Pakistan team member at the Asian Pacific Mathematical Olympiad, Asif now helps drive Cursor’s near $10 billion valuation and more than $100 million annual recurring revenue.

Early life and mathematical foundation

Sualeh Asif (pronounced as Saleh Asif), who was born in Karachi, first made waves representing Pakistan in international math contests during high school. He earned honourable mentions at both the 2017 and 2018 Asian Pacific Mathematical Olympiads, scoring solid marks on the toughest problems. According to his personal website, between 2016 and 2018, he competed at the IMO and even taught at Pakistani math camps. These formative experiences reflect his early drive and technical acumen.

He later studied machine learning, number theory, performance engineering and theatre at MIT in 2022, collaborating on early large‑language‑model projects like ‘Metaphor’ and working at IBM Watson. At MIT, he forged connections with fellow co‑founders Michael Truell, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger — a team bound by nights spent refining software and debugging each other’s code.

Cursor’s rapid ascent

Launched in 2023, Cursor (Cursor AI) is an enhanced code editor built atop Visual Studio Code and designed for human‑AI tandem programming. It fuses autocomplete, chat interaction and context‑aware suggestions informed by the user’s full codebase. Asif, now Chief Product Officer (CPO), leads development on core features like the “Tab” function, a speculative‑editing tool that anticipates multi‑line changes.

Cursor attracted early attention from the OpenAI Startup Fund. In late 2022, the startup secured a seed round totaling $11 million, co‑led by the OpenAI fund, and backed by names such as Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO) and Dropbox’s Arash Ferdowsi. A $60 million Series A in mid‑2023 under Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital assigned a $400 million valuation.

Momentum continued.

By March 2025, the company hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue — a record within just a year of launch. A $105 million Series B in January raised the valuation to $2.5 billion, followed by a mid‑2025 funding round totaling $900 million, reaching nearly $10 billion in value.

Cursor now supports over one million users, including developers at Stripe, Midjourney, OpenAI, and Shopify. Subscription revenue reportedly climbed from $4 million in April 2024 to $48 million by year‑end, making the founders millionaires.

And yes, Sualeh Asif’s net worth is more than $100 million and the other 3 co-founders also have the same estimated net worths.

Technical edge and user reaction

Cursor’s competitive advantage lies in deep codebase awareness. It maps not just current code but structure, commit history and past debugging. Models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet O1 are orchestrated through an in‑house “Model Context Protocol” to optimize performance.

In a Lex Fridman podcast, Asif labeled Cursor’s Tab feature “predict and apply entire code edits” — guiding the cursor across files, jumping contextually and even proposing terminal commands. He frames Cursor not as a replacement, but enhancement — a “fast colleague” that removes repetitive, predictable work so the human operator steers creative effort.

Reddit users echo this sentiment. One praised, “integrates… into my IDE… by far the best AI tool I have used,” while acknowledging occasional setup tweaks.

Navigating rapid scaling and competition

Fast growth brings fresh challenges. A recent support‑center error mistakenly claimed Cursor licenses were device‑specific, quickly rectified by the team. Meanwhile, Cursor contends with heavyweight competitors: GitHub Copilot, Amazon Q, and JetBrains AI.

Still, the founding ethos remains clear. Asif emphasizes tools that “increase productivity and learning, not replace the coder”. He brings to Cursor a blend of mathematical rigor, global perspective from Pakistan, and product vision honed at MIT and in industry.

What lies ahead?

Cursor’s recent funding enables feature expansion and enterprise adoption. The platform plans to strengthen AI–human collaboration, enhance context‑tracking across projects, and improve model efficiency. As other firms push into automated documentation, code review, and security, Cursor’s challenge will be to uphold trust and developer control.

Sualeh Asif’s journey from being raised in Karachi to Islamabad math competitor to MIT scholar and becoming a tech leader exemplifies the global pool of problem‑solvers behind today’s AI surge. With the world’s smallest Pakistan‑born voice at the helm of a near‑$10 billion AI startup, his story underscores how talent, rigor and cross‑cultural roots shape tomorrow’s technology and how everybody can relate to the new world and do something different.