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.¹²³

Truell was born in New York City and studied at the Horace Mann School, where he would meet Aman Sanger, a future co-founder. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, majoring in computer science and mathematics.² During his early years, he developed an interest in programming and worked on improving reinforcement learning for simple robotic tasks.¹⁴ He co-created the Halite AI Programming Competition in 2016, which served over 10,000 contestants across three seasons of competition.⁵⁶ In 2017, Michael attended the Research Science Institute.⁷ While at MIT, he did research on the 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.⁹¹⁰ 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.³¹ 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.²¹¹

Cursor has been reported to generate over $1 billion in annualized revenue and is used by companies such as Nvidia, Adobe, Uber, and Shopify.²³ 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