Sualeh Asif
Sualeh Asif is chief product officer of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor. He is from Karachi, Pakistan, and represented Pakistan at the International Mathematical Olympiad from 2016 to 2018, winning a bronze medal. At MIT he studied machine learning, number theory, performance engineering, and theater, worked on graph connectivity, and graduated in 2022. In 2022 he helped incorporate Anysphere with Michael Truell, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger, and the company built AI tools for writing code via natural-language instructions. In August 2026 SpaceX acquired the company for $60 billion, and Cursor continued as a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX, integrated into the SpaceXAI team.
Timeline
-
2016–2018
A bronze medal at the IMO
From Karachi he represents Pakistan at the International Mathematical Olympiad from 2016 to 2018 and wins a bronze medal. He studies and teaches competitive math at the Pakistani math camps.
-
2019–2021
Algorithms and Picard curves
In 2019 he presents Tetris is NP-Hard Even with O(1) Columns at the Japan Conference on Discrete and Computational Geometry, Graphs and Games. Arithmetic Expression Construction is presented in 2020 at the International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation. Computing L-Polynomials of Picard Curves from Cartier-Manin Matrices appears in Mathematics of Computation in 2021.
-
2021–2022
Graph connectivity at MIT
In the 2021–2022 SuperUROP cohort he is an Angle Undergraduate Research and Innovation Scholar in electrical engineering and computer science. With Julian Shun he works on a fast batch-dynamic algorithm for connectivity and studies graph connectivity.
-
By 2022
Studies and a search engine
Studies at MIT cover machine learning, number theory, performance engineering, and theater, and he graduates in 2022. Early contributions go to Metaphor, an end-to-end LLM powered search engine, and he works on translation at IBM Watson ML.
-
2022
Co-founding Anysphere
In 2022 Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger incorporate Anysphere while they are students at MIT. The company builds AI tools for writing code via natural-language instructions.
-
Early 2026
A multibillion-dollar editor
By early 2026 Cursor reaches a US$29.3 billion valuation and surpasses $3 billion in annual recurring revenue. By early 2026 he and Aman Sanger become billionaires in the AI sector.
-
August 2026
An acquisition by SpaceX
SpaceX acquires the company for $60 billion in August 2026. Each Cursor cofounder receives shares of the rocket maker worth $2.4 billion at the closing. Cursor survives as a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX and is being integrated into the SpaceXAI team.
-
As of October 2026
Chief product officer
As of October 2026 he is chief product officer of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, and leads the product vision and user experience for Cursor. Millions of software developers at enterprises like Nvidia, Adobe, Uber, and Shopify use Cursor to generate and edit chunks of code. He is building Cursor to discover a new way to write code.
Sources and credits
Photo: We have no published photo of Sualeh Asif yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.