Truell grew up in New York City and attended the Horace Mann School, a private prep school in the Bronx. He’d always had an interest in technology, and started coding at age 11 to make his own mobile games, he told Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle.
“In 2021 we were trying to figure out what we do with that interest,” he said. “Do we go and work on AI in academia? Or … do we go join, you know, a big existing AI effort? Or do we start our own thing?”
It wasn’t until about six months later the team pivoted into AI coding, which Truell said at first they had avoided “because we thought it was too competitive.” But the team was desperate after their first couple of ideas failed to get off the ground, he said.
Plus, “we realized we were really inherently excited about the future of coding,” he said during the Y Combinator interview.
That passion propelled Truell and his cofounders to one of the fastest upward trajectories in the history of Silicon Valley startups. The company’s valuation has skyrocketed almost as fast as AI’s capabilities have improved. Cursor raised an initial $60 million funding round in June 2024. By the end of 2025, it had raised three more funding rounds that brought in $3.3 billion, skyrocketing its valuation from $2.5 billion to $30 billion in a single year.
Cursor is a coding assistant with its own integrated development environment, or IDE, where the company’s AI is built-in. At its most basic level, Cursor’s AI capabilities let users code more quickly by constantly working to predict the code a user is likely to write next. With the launch of Cursor 3 earlier this month, the company has improved on its agentic coding, in which AI can write code on its own with broad user guidance—a move to compete with Anthropic’s Claude Code, which launched just over a year ago but already has gained popularity among programmers.
Ultimately, what may have made Cursor a success where the founders’ other projects failed was a simple decision: to go all in.
“We had a ton of conviction about that, and we had a ton of excitement about that, and so at some point we just decided to go for it,” Truell said.
