SpaceX has struck a deal giving it the right to buy AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion later this year, or settle for a $10 billion working partnership, as Elon Musk’s company tries to close the gap with rivals in one of the fastest-moving corners of the technology industry.

The announcement, made Tuesday in a post on X, puts one of Silicon Valley’s most talked-about startups squarely inside Musk’s expanding orbit, just months before SpaceX is expected to go public in what could be the largest stock market debut in history.

Cursor, owned by parent company Anysphere and co-founded in early 2022 by four MIT students, Michael Truell, Aman Sanger, Sualeh Asif, and Arvid Lunnemark, builds tools that use artificial intelligence to help software developers write code faster.

The company released its first product in March 2023, and within months, it had spread rapidly through the developer community. By November 2023, it had cataloged 150,000 codebases. In June 2024, it raised a $60 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.

From zero to $2 billion in three years

What followed was a funding streak rarely seen in enterprise software. Through 2025, Cursor raised three additional rounds totalling $3.3 billion. Its valuation opened 2025 at $2.5 billion and closed the year at $29.3 billion after a $2.3 billion Series D in November. Before that came a $900 million round in June 2025 when it was valued at $9.9 billion. The company is now in talks to raise another $2 billion at a valuation above $50 billion, with Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital expected to co-lead, joined by Nvidia and Battery Ventures.

“If you subtract out the dollars invested, it’s the fastest-growing company we’ve ever seen,” said Martin Casado, Andreessen Horowitz general partner and Cursor board member.

Revenue has grown at a similar pace. Annualized revenue hit $500 million in May 2025, doubled to $1 billion by October, and crossed $2 billion in February 2026.

Cursor says its tools are now used by 67% of the Fortune 500, including Uber and Adobe, and generate 150 million lines of enterprise code every day. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, an investor and partner, told CNBC in October: “My favorite enterprise AI service is Cursor. Every one of our engineers, 100 percent, is now assisted by AI coders, and our productivity has gone up incredibly.”

A fast rise now under pressure

Yet the company’s quick growth has landed it in a difficult position. Anthropic launched Claude Code as a research preview in February 2025, and it caught on fast. By early 2026, Claude Code had a $2.5 billion annual run rate and more than 300,000 business customers. The difference between the two products is significant: Cursor helps developers write code faster, while Claude Code writes entire chunks of code on its own. “We invented agentic coding as a thing,” said Boris Cherny, Anthropic’s head of Claude Code.

Social media has begun buzzing with the idea that Cursor is in trouble. One startup, Valon, publicly said in February it was moving off Cursor, setting off a wave of “Cursor is dead” commentary online. Some investors have noticed clients pulling back. Two of Cursor’s own engineers, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg, left in March to join SpaceX and xAI.

There is also a pricing problem. Cursor pays open-market rates to access AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI, the same companies competing directly against it. “Anthropic is trying to drown out Cursor,” one venture capitalist told Fortune.

To reduce that reliance, Cursor has been developing its own model, called Composer, since 2025. Composer has outperformed Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 on some benchmarks, though Composer 2 came in behind OpenAI’s GPT 5.4. A Cursor blog post on Tuesday said model training had been “bottlenecked by compute” and that the SpaceX deal would let it “dramatically scale up” its models using xAI’s Colossus supercomputer cluster in Memphis.

SpaceX, for its part, has its own reasons to move fast. The company filed IPO paperwork with the SEC in early April and plans a roadshow in early June. It merged with xAI in February in a deal valued at $1.25 trillion and is now seeking a $1.75 trillion valuation, which would make it the biggest IPO ever. It ended 2025 with $24.7 billion in cash.

Cursor CEO Michael Truell, 25, said the deal was “a meaningful step on our path to build the best place to code with AI.” Whether SpaceX eventually buys the company or not, Truell has said he wants to build something that lasts. In an industry where everything changes every six months, that is a harder task than it sounds.

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