SpaceX has acquired AI programming tool Cursor, owned by Anysphere, in an all-stock deal valued at approximately $60 billion. The transaction has closed, and Cursor is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of SpaceX AI. Previously, SpaceX secured the $60 billion acquisition option in April or a breakup arrangement of about $10 billion, exercising the option after going public in June. a16z has held shares since Series A and, upon exit, held about 26% in total with Thrive.

Cursor was founded in 2022 by four MIT students and raised $2.3 billion in Series D led by Accel and Coatue in November 2025, with a valuation of $29.3 billion; it was also pursuing a new round with a valuation of about $5 billion before the acquisition. At the time of the deal, annualized revenue was in the range of $2 billion to $4 billion, with about 50,000 enterprise customers and total funding of approximately $2.7 billion to $3.4 billion. Founders hold about 20%, corresponding to about $12 billion; the employee option pool is about 11%. Shares were exchanged for approximately 389 million shares of SpaceX Class A stock.

AMD is acquiring World Labs, founded by Fei-Fei Li, for approximately $8.2 billion in an all-stock deal, expected to close by the end of the year. Li will serve as AMD's Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist, reporting to Lisa Su. World Labs focuses on spatial intelligence and world modeling, generating and simulating interactive 3D environments from text, images, and video, with a projected valuation exceeding $1 billion in 2024. This year, it has completed about $1 billion in financing, with investors including a16z, NEA, Nvidia, and Autodesk. The company has about 70 employees and previously acquired the robotics simulation team SceniX.

Stripe has acquired the AI model routing platform OpenRouter, with reports indicating a price of about $7.5 billion. The founders are set to receive about $1.5 billion, while investors will receive around $6 billion. In May, the Series B valuation was only about $1.3 billion, reflecting a premium of about five times within three months. OpenRouter provides a unified API to route between hundreds of models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, etc., based on price and performance, with annualized revenue rising from about $5 million to approximately $140 million. a16z participated in early rounds. Databricks had previously participated in the bidding.

Unexited groups are simultaneously raising valuations: Databricks completed $5 billion in financing in August, with a valuation of $190 billion and annualized revenue exceeding $7 billion, up over 80% year-on-year; Mistral raised about €3 billion in September led by Samsung, with a valuation of about $24 billion, targeting $1 billion in annual recurring revenue by year-end; ElevenLabs is negotiating a secondary transfer with a valuation of about $22 billion, with annual recurring revenue of about $600 million; Fal is discussing a new round valued between $15 billion and $20 billion, with annualized revenue of about $800 million; Periodic Labs, founded by former OpenAI research VP Liam Fedus, has a Series A valuation of about $7.5 billion.

Buyers are from industries needing coding data, world models, and model routing entry points: SpaceX is using publicly traded stock to acquire Cursor's engineering distribution and code data, AMD is using stock to acquire physical world models and Li's team, and Stripe is using its payment network to create a routable token distribution entry. Sellers are early shareholders and founders who have already achieved high multiples. Funding is shifting from primary market follow-on investments to industry acquisitions, with strong event-driven characteristics. Beneficiaries are early funds and founders who entered Cursor, World Labs, and OpenRouter; pressured parties are late buyers who still need to purchase inference and model layers at public market multiples, as well as independent inference clouds losing their largest coding clients to SpaceX.

Source: Public Information