AI coding company Cursor, soon to be acquired by SpaceX, expands its CFO council

Good morning. CFOs are moving from the sidelines of AI strategy to the center of the conversation, and Cursor’s new CFO Council aims to turn that shift into a playbook for AI ROI.

Cursor, the AI coding company being acquired by SpaceX in a $60 billion all-stock transaction, has launched a CFO Council that will meet quarterly in rotating cities, beginning Aug. 18 in San Francisco. The group brings together finance leaders from tech-forward and legacy companies.

Newly announced members on Wednesday include Michael Brophy, CFO of Natera; Bea Ordonez, CFO of Payoneer; Dinesh Jain, CFO of Firstsource; Matthew Wajner, CFO of First American Bank; Ed Grabscheid, CFO of JFrog; and Andrew Casey, CFO of Amplitude. They join members announced on July 6: Sonalee Parekh, CFO of SentinelOne; Madhur Deora, CFO of Paytm; and Aziz Megji, CFO of Asana. New members are being accepted on a rolling basis. 

I sat down with Cursor COO Jordan Topoleski, who helped develop the council, to discuss why the initiative came together.

“Everyone’s spending on AI…but it’s really hard to actually understand how we can measure the tactical ROI,” he told me, describing a common concern among Fortune 500 customers using Cursor’s agentic platform at scale.

While CIOs and CTOs still lead AI implementation, CFOs are increasingly expected to answer a tougher question, for example: Where does a dollar of AI spending reliably generate $10 in business value rather than 50 cents? Measuring that return has become a growing priority for finance leaders.

Topoleski announced the initiative with a simple LinkedIn post and was surprised by the response, receiving numerous requests to........

© Fortune