Michael Truell Is on the 2026 TIME100 Next - Time Magazine

In an industry that reinvents itself every quarter, Michael Truell is taking the long view. It was clear in 2022, he says, that we’d “get to a place where all of the code in the world was going to be written by [AI] models.” As co-­founder of Anysphere, he has steered his company through a period of rapid growth.

Anysphere created Cursor, a tool for automating software development. In June, Anysphere’s annualized revenue reached $4 billion—double what it was in February. In August, it was acquired by Elon Musk’s SpaceX for $60 billion—a record-­breaking sum. Truell, 26, has seen the competitive landscape evolve several times since Cursor entered the market. His company’s main competitors have shifted from other coding startups to frontier giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which possess staggering resources. But now Truell is attached to a giant himself. The deal with SpaceX grants access to huge amounts of computing power, necessary for training frontier models. Recently, he said that scale-up should let Cursor reach the frontier, “and hopefully, soon leapfrog it.”