Four MIT computer science graduates — Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger — incorporated Anysphere in 2022 with a $400K pre-seed. They spent their first year "wandering in the desert," building AI tools for mechanical engineering and CAD. They lacked domain expertise, hit data scarcity walls, and kept gravitating back to what they actually knew: code.

The Pivot

In early 2023, they pivoted to building an AI-native code editor. They shipped their MVP alongside GPT-4's launch in March 2023. Initial hype brought users, but usage tanked after the novelty wore off. The turning point came months later when they shipped two features that actually stuck: Cmd+K instructed edits and Codebase Indexing — the ability to ask any question about your entire codebase.

Zero Marketing, Pure Product

What happened next defied SaaS orthodoxy. Cursor reached $100M ARR with reportedly zero marketing spend. No sales team, no ads, no content marketing. Developers at OpenAI, Midjourney, Perplexity, and Shopify adopted it individually and spread it to their teams. By end of 2023 they had $1M ARR. Twelve months later: $100M ARR — the fastest $1M-to-$100M ramp in SaaS history.

The Team

They hired obsessively slowly — one person every 2-3 months. They avoided networking events, conferences, and speaking engagements to focus entirely on product. By the time they hit $100M ARR, the core team was still tiny. Michael described their hiring filter as seeking "macro-optimists, micro-pessimists" — people who believe in the long-term vision but are never satisfied with today's execution.

• Pre-seed: $400K (April 2022)
• First year: Built wrong product (CAD tools)
• Public launch: March 2023
• $1M ARR: December 2023
• $100M ARR: October 2024 (12 months later)
• Series B: $100M at $2.6B valuation (December 2024)
• $1B+ ARR: Late 2025