Claire Smilow helped BoxGroup earn a roughly $1 billion return on Cursor. Now she’s scouting college campuses for the next generation of founders

Claire Smilow has built a career on spotting people before the rest of tech catches on. The payoff came in 2019, when she met Michael Truell, then a sophomore at MIT, and saw both commercial sense and strategic depth before he had even started a company.

Three years later, she helped push BoxGroup into Truell’s new startup, Cursor. The firm invested $750,000 in the AI coding company, then added a couple of follow-on checks. By the time SpaceX bought Cursor for $60 billion in 2026, that early stake was estimated to have turned into about $1 billion for BoxGroup. On the original investment alone, that works out to a roughly 650-fold return.

Smilow, now 36 and a partner at BoxGroup and Dorm Room Fund, is still using campuses as a hunting ground. She says she spends a “huge” amount of time talking to young AI natives, and she has another trip planned to Harvard and MIT, her second visit there this year. The pitch is simple: college is where she can hear what students are studying, what they want to build, and which technologies are starting to pull their attention.

That listening has become part of her edge. Smilow says she’s been spending a lot of time on frontier areas like robotics and quantum computing, and a fall 2024 campus conversation about brain-computer interfaces caught her attention when roughly four out of 20 to 25 students brought it up. Two years later, she says, early-stage BCI companies are already popping up.

Her approach is less about age than signal. BoxGroup has also backed Ramp and Clay early, and both have since reached multibillion-dollar valuations. Smilow says the firm works with companies that are almost “never proven,” and she’d rather hear from peers than from old bosses when trying to judge a founder. For her, the best clue is often who talented students keep coming back to in conversation.