Another Day, Another Poach But a Real Acquisition for Windsurf

Cognition announced it had acquired Windsurf in full, including its intellectual property, brand, commercial business, and remaining team.
Just after the market closed on a Friday, Google confirmed it had hired the startup’s CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and a group of core engineers to join its DeepMind team. The arrangement, valued at 2.4 billion dollars in licensing and compensation, stopped short of a full acquisition and left behind the rest of the company. For employees still at Windsurf, many of whom had joined within the last twelve months, there were few answers and no immediate signs of compensation. The startup had been considered one of the fastest-growing players in AI development tooling. Its agentic IDE gained early traction with enterprise users and was reportedly in talks with OpenAI for a three billion dollar acquisition earlier this year. That deal fell through in part due to tensions with
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Anshika Mathews
Anshika is the Senior Content Strategist for AIM Research. She holds a keen interest in technology and related policy-making and its impact on society. She can be reached at anshika.mathews@aimresearch.co
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