New Delhi, Sept. 1 -- Aman Sanger was one of four MIT students experimenting with the possibilities of artificial intelligence when he helped establish Anysphere in 2022. Four years later, the company behind AI coding platform Cursor has agreed to be acquired by Elon Musk's SpaceX in a deal valued at $60 billion.

The transaction has turned the 25-year-old Indian-origin entrepreneur and his three co-founders into some of the technology industry's youngest billionaires. But the path to the deal began long before SpaceX entered the picture, with an attempt to answer a simple question about how artificial intelligence could change the work of software developers.

Sanger founded Anysphere with Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif and Arvid Lunnemark,...