Meet Aman Sanger: MIT alumnus who learned coding at 14 and co-founded Cursor, the AI startup being acquired by Elon Musk’s SpaceX for $60 billion
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been making headlines for the past few weeks for its much-awaited IPO that is set to make many people billionaires. As of now, the private space company is trending for acquiring a startup for a whopping $60 billion.Cursor, a San Francisco-based AI coding startup was founded in 2022 by four MIT students, Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger. On Tuesday, it was announced that SpaceX has formally agreed to take over the company, thus turning its three co-founders into billionaires worth $2.7 billion each. Among them is Aman Sanger, son of Indian immigrants to the United States.
Meet Aman Sanger
Aman Sanger is one of the three co-founders of Cursor who was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when they founded the AI startup. His father, Arvind Sanger is an alumnus of IIT Bombay and Tulane University. He founded Geopshere Capital, a global long-short fund manager investing in natural resources, industrial and Indian equities in 2007. His mother Shilpa Sanger, is an orthodontist, entrepreneur and angel investor. The two met while studying in New York and tied the knot after 18 months of dating. As per reports, he was 14 when he began coding. He attended the Horace Mann School from 2014-2018, which is a highly competitive co-education college preparatory school in New York City. In 2018, he joined MIT for a Bachelor’s in Computer Science. Along with this, he is well-versed in programming languages such as Python and Java and speaks proficient Spanish. He displayed an early interest in coding and achieved a perfect score of 800 in the SAT Subject Test in Mathematics Level 2 in 2017.In terms of his professional journey, Sanger began as a Software Engineering intern at Google from May to August 2019. He then moved on to become an Investment Associate intern at Bridgewater Associates from July to August 2020. From October 2019 to September 2020, he ran an AI consultancy firm called Research. During his time at MIT, he also co-founded Anysphere, the team credited for taking Cursor from an early-age startup to a successful AI development platform.
What is Cursor?
While SpaceX secured an agreement that includes an option to acquire Cursor for $60 billion, the companies could also pursue a $10 billion partnership focused on AI collaboration. But why is Cursor so important?Cursor is an AI-powered coding system that helps developers write, edit and understand code more efficiently. Unlike traditional tools, it acts like an assistant, analysing entire codebases, suggesting improvements and generating complex solutions. It can understand context across multiple files, help debug issues and speed up development workflows.Today, it has turned into one of the many companies that has added four more young AI founders to the list of billionaires.
