From Intern to CEO of a $10B company in 3 years
Arcads ARR hit $5M with 5 people, cursor ARR hit $200M
The tiny team is still doing a good job, while Arcads AI ARR hit $5M with only 5 people.
Arcads.ai is a French startup that offers an AI-powered platform for creating video advertisements. It transforms text inputs into high-quality video ads using lifelike AI-generated actors, streamlining the ad creation process for marketers and agencies.
The platform addresses common challenges in video production, such as high costs and time constraints, by enabling rapid and scalable content creation without the need for traditional filming resources.
As of April 2025, Arcads.ai has achieved an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $5 million with only 5 people.
The secret is they use lots of AI agents everywhere, cofounder Jeddi said in a Twitter post, such as:
AI Growth Agent: Scrapes their competitor ads >feeds them into o1 >creates viral videos in arcads
AI Ghostwitter: Scrapes their internal database of winning Twitter posts >suggests top ideas>adds them to our Notion
AI Intern: Gets the transcripts of their Zoom meeting (with Fathom) > extracts top ideas with ChatGPT API >sends an email recap with top ideas for X posts
Google Ads AI Agent: Generates new keywords based on results >creates landing pages for each keyword with Claude >adjusts automatically the bids on Google ads
Other Agents are customer support AI Agent, sales Agent, AI CFO and AI head of talent….
They use these AI Agents EVERY DAY to keep the team tiny. My source said they are in talks with fundraising with top VCs like Sequoia, Benchmark and a16z….
However, cursor is building another big story. The world never lacks business miracles. Every few years, new iconic figures emerge, and Michael Truell, co-founder and CEO of Cursor, appears to be one of the latest rising stars.
According to The Information and other sources, Cursor, the hottest AI-powered coding tool, has just completed a new funding round at a staggering $10 billion valuation. The round, led by Thrive and a16z, raised $625 million, with a pre-money valuation of $9.6 billion. Accel also joined as a new investor.
This valuation marks a fourfold increase from its previous round, which valued the company at $2.5 billion post-money in November 2024. Cursor’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) has now surpassed $200 million, maintaining a valuation multiple of around 50x—similar to the previous round.
In less than six months, both Cursor’s ARR and valuation have grown fourfold. Looking back a year to May 2024, Cursor’s valuation was only $400 million.
What makes Cursor even more impressive is its Net Dollar Retention (NDR), which has reached a staggering 200%. In comparison, industry benchmarks like Slack, Zoom, and Salesforce have NDRs of around 130%, 140%, and 110%, respectively.
Several key factors behind Cursor’s explosive growth highlighted by Gergely Orosz:
Coding is an incredible PMF for LLMs.
Execution speed + iteration speed matters so much. Copilot launched ahead of Cursor but Cursor out-iterated Copilot (so far).
Superior UX matters. Cursor keeps innovating and is a step ahead. Eg Composer and agent mode are all ahead of most others.
Being tied to an AI vendor can backfire. GitHub Copilot hesitated adding support for Sonnet 3.5. due to their OpenAI relationship. Cursor added it immediately: provided a much better DX and IMO won market share + mind share bug time.
Distribution power matters less for devs! GitHub has massive distribution: and yet Cursor is spreading like wildfire based on word of mouth (and because of how good it works - and the more than reasonable pricing).
A Brief Timeline of Cursor:
2022: Company founded
2023: OpenAI’s startup fund led an $8 million seed round
May 2024: a16z led a $60 million Series A round at a $400 million valuation, with investors including Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Jeff Dean, Noam Brown, and executives from Stripe, GitHub, Ramp, Perplexity, and OpenAI
November 2024: Acquired Supermaven
November 2024: Thrive and a16z led a $100+ million Series B round at a $2.5 billion valuation, with Benchmark among the investors
April 2025: Thrive and a16z led a $625 million Series C round, valuing the company at $10 billion
Michael Truell: The 25-Year-Old CEO Behind Cursor’s Success
Michael Truell’s career before founding Cursor was unconventional. Aside from spending a year as a researcher at MIT, his only work experience consisted of internships—all lasting less than a year. Now, at just 25, he is the CEO of a $10 billion company.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Truell previously interned at Octant, Google, and Two Sigma. Notably, Octant later raised an $80 million Series B round.
Truell’s entrepreneurial journey started early. In high school, he co-created an online coding competition platform, Halite, which attracted over 5,500 users and won the 2017 ACM/CSTA Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing. The $10,000 award helped fund his studies at MIT.
During college, Truell caught the attention of tech giants, securing a Google internship where he worked on complex search algorithms. At hedge fund Two Sigma, he applied mathematical skills to financial models. At Octant, he explored how AI could accelerate drug discovery in computational biology. These diverse experiences deepened his understanding of AI’s transformative potential across industries.
The Birth of Cursor
As graduation approached in 2022, Truell and three MIT classmates—Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark, and Aman Sanger—began discussing the future of software development.
Asif recalled their shared frustration: they saw AI’s potential to revolutionize coding, yet existing tools felt clunky and disconnected from real developer workflows.
This frustration led to the founding of Anysphere, an applied research lab with Truell as CEO. Their first product was Cursor—an AI-powered code editor built on Visual Studio Code, but enhanced with sophisticated AI capabilities.
Like many early-stage founders, they worked tirelessly, often questioning themselves, yet firmly believing they were building something revolutionary. Their core belief: AI shouldn’t just assist programmers—it should fundamentally reshape how coding works.
Their perseverance paid off in late 2023 when OpenAI’s startup fund led an $8 million seed round in Anysphere. More than just funding, this provided a crucial stamp of validation. Soon, the word spread within developer circles, and engineers from OpenAI, Midjourney, and Shopify started using Cursor, drawn to its intuitive interface and powerful AI features.
Beyond the product itself, Cursor’s vision resonated widely. Truell once stated:
We don’t just want to build another coding tool with AI features. We want to reimagine the entire relationship between developers and AI—creating a true partnership that amplifies human creativity rather than replacing it.
Less than a year after its seed round, Cursor surpassed 40,000 customers. This rapid success caught the attention of a16z, leading to a $60 million Series A round at a $400 million valuation—an impressive feat for a two-year-old startup.
In November 2024, Cursor acquired AI coding assistant Supermaven, integrating its technology and team to further enhance its product. Shortly after, Thrive and a16z led a new round, pushing Cursor’s valuation to $2.5 billion.