Pakistan-Born Sualeh Asif Becomes a New Billionaire!
Sualeh Asif probably became Pakistan's first dollar billionaire startup founder while living abroad!
Anysphere, the parent company of AI coding tool Cursor, raised $2.3 billion in a Series D funding round that valued the firm at $29.3 billion. The investment, led by Accel and Coatue with participation from Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, Nvidia and Google, marked the third funding event for the startup in 2025 and elevated its valuation to nearly 12 times the level from January.
The round brought total capital raised by Anysphere since its 2022 founding to $3.38 billion.
Sualeh Asif, a 25-year-old cofounder from Karachi, Pakistan, and a former International Mathematics Olympiad competitor, now holds a 4.5% stake in the company worth at least $1.3 billion, according to estimates, and that's how he became a new billionaire founder.
Asif, who dropped out of MIT, started the company with fellow MIT graduates Michael Truell, Aman Sanger and Arvid Lunnemark, all in their mid-20s.
The same stake value applies to each of the other three founders, placing them in the newly minted billionaires category as well.
Lunnemark departed in October 2025 to launch Integrous Research, a venture focused on safer AI systems.
Cursor (largely developed by Sualeh Asif) serves as Anysphere's sole product and functions as an AI-powered code editor used by millions of developers, including teams at Nvidia, Adobe, Uber, Shopify and PayPal.
The tool enables users to access AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI for writing, editing and debugging code.
In October 2025, the company introduced its own model called Composer, trained for faster code generation and tasks such as file and codebase modifications.
Anysphere reported annualized revenue exceeding $1 billion, with annual recurring revenue expanding from $1 million in 2023 to $100 million within about 12 months.
The startup plans to apply the new funds to develop a code editor that is more helpful, delightful and fun than the world has ever seen.
Sualeh Asif's cofounder, Aman Sanger, said:
“If you look at the amount that other foundational model companies are spending relative to revenue, it's significant. We are planning to build a more sustainable business,”
Anysphere also acquired tech recruiting firm Growth by Design, which has collaborated with AI companies including OpenAI, and integrated two of its founding partners plus several team members into Cursor operations.
