SpaceX and xAI buy Cursor for $60B
Cursor writes and edits software code for programmers. It was founded in 2022 and now makes about $4B a year. No venture-backed company has ever been bought for more on its first sale. The charts below show why the price is a record without being an expensive one.
The largest acquisitions of venture-backed companies ever
Enterprise value at acquisition — the price of the business once its cash and debt are counted. Green = the company’s first sale; blue = already public, or sold once before. Excludes Visa Europe. The right-hand column is that price divided by revenue.
Cursor shown at 15× — $60B on ~$4B current (June 2026) revenue; ~10× on the ~$6B it’s pacing toward this year. Other multiples per company filings.
Source: Dealroom.co · Enterprise/deal value at announcement, $B. First-time exit = first acquisition; repeat = post-IPO or previously acquired company.
Dealroom’s estimate of how the $60B is divided between founders, employees and funds.
Who owned Cursor at the $60B sale
Estimated ownership at the $60B sale. Founders hold 20% (≈$12B); Thrive Capital and a16z together hold about 26% (≈$15.6B).
Source: Dealroom.co · Cap table per Dealroom estimate at exit (April 2026).
What each investor gets back depends on the price they paid to come in.
Money in, money out, by investor cohort
Estimated gross proceeds at the $60B exit. Money in is inferred from exit ownership and each cohort’s entry valuation because exact investor allocations and follow-on cheques are not public.
Method: money out = estimated exit ownership × $60B. Return is the gross multiple of money returned, using the entry valuation implied by the round; money in is money out ÷ return. This is a roughly-right proceeds model, not a legal cap table, and excludes preference stacks, secondaries, option-pool refreshes and exact follow-on allocations.
Source: Dealroom.co · Exit ownership, entry rounds and valuations as marked; Dealroom analysis. Alameda Research’s seed stake was forfeited in the FTX bankruptcy.
Cursor reached about $4B of annual revenue in under four years. The next independent coding tool is at about $1B.
Revenue of Cursor and the independent AI coding tools
Annualised recurring revenue (ARR) over time for the AI coding tools not owned by a foundation-model provider. At ~$4B, Cursor runs several times ahead of its nearest independent rival — Replit, at about $1B — and far above the rest. Shown on a linear scale by default; switch to log to compare the smaller players’ growth rates.
Source: Dealroom.co Next Gen API — latest revenue (Replit $1B, Lovable $500M, Cursor) — with earlier points from reported ARR milestones; Cognition & Bolt latest points estimated. ARR in US$; toggle linear / log. “Independent” = not owned by a foundation-model lab.
Set against the other big AI acquisitions, Cursor sold for less per dollar of sales than most of them.
Revenue multiple against growth, across major AI acquisitions
Every major AI acquisition, plotted by revenue growth at the deal (horizontal) against the EV / revenue multiple the buyer paid (vertical). Bubble size = deal value. Cursor wrote the biggest cheque of all — yet at ~15× (on today’s ~$4B revenue) it bought in for less than half the median multiple, and that falls toward ~10× as this year’s revenue lands.
Source: Dealroom.co · Deal value ÷ revenue; growth and multiples per Dealroom estimate. Cursor: $60B ÷ ~$4B current revenue ≈ 15× (≈10× on its forward ~$6B). GitHub (2018) shown as a developer-tool benchmark.
What this means
$60B is the most anyone has paid for a venture-backed company on its first sale. It is not, by the standards of this market, an expensive price. At about 15 times revenue Cursor costs less per dollar of sales than several smaller and slower-growing AI acquisitions. SpaceX and xAI are paying a record sum for a business that is already large, rather than for the promise of one.