OpenAI's Windsurf Deal Is Off, Windsurf's CEO Is Going To Google

OpenAI's planned acquisition of Windsurf has fallen apart. Instead, Google is hiring Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and parts of its R&D team to join DeepMind and focus on agentic coding for Gemini. Google will not acquire Windsurf but will receive a non-exclusive license to some of its technology, while Windsurf continues independently under new leadership. The Verge reports: Effective immediately, Jeff Wang, Windsurf's head of business, has become interim CEO, and Graham Moreno, its VP of global sales, will be Windsurf's new president. "Gemini is one of the best models available and we've been investing in its advanced capabilities for developers," Chris Pappas, a spokesperson for Google, told The Verge in a statement. "We're excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf's team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding."

"We are excited to be joining Google DeepMind along with some of the Windsurf team," Mohan and Chen said in a statement. "We are proud of what Windsurf has built over the last four years and are excited to see it move forward with their world class team and kick-start the next phase." Google didn't share how much it was paying to bring on the team. OpenAI was previously reported to be buying Windsurf for $3 billion.

Interesting

[registrations_suck]

Never heard of "Windsurf" (where do they get these stupid names?), but for some reason, I find this approach to "faux-acquisition" of a company interesting.

I wonder how common it is, or will become - and how long before governments and others bitch about it being unfair in one way or another.

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[martin-boundary]

It is ultra common. For example, the vast majority of Google's successful products have not been built in-house, but have been acquired from startups. Google is good at buying competitors.

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[registrations_suck]

I think you misunderstood my point.

I was not referring to buying competitors, or specific products, but hiring away key people while licensing the products, as described in the summary.

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[martin-boundary]

Thanks for the correction, you're right I was too quick to interpret your comment in the usual way. In a previous era the non-competes would prevent the CEO from being hired immediately by Google, but the changes in the law regarding enforceability are clearly making that move a new possibility.

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[ZipNada]

Their name used to be Codeium, or Codium, or something. They made a fork of the vscode IDE that has a good interface to various LLM's. Not much more than a fancy extension. It got some traction and they changed it to a sexier name. I use it, its very convenient. It appears to extend the context window of LLM's with some sort of side metadata.

Their discord group is very active. I bet they have a lot of users and they funnel a lot of prompts to OpenAI products. That got OpenAI's attention. But no way is it wo

Huh?

[backslashdot]

Dude goes from being CEO of a $3 billion company to an individual contributor writing code in a subdivision of a subdivision within Google? That is bad ass, if true.

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[registrations_suck]

It might be hard to understand until you know how much he pockets in the process.

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[zdzichu]

If he extracted part of that valuation, this job is basically a retirement with something to do.