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

Heron Data Targets Manual Backlogs with Vertical AI and $16.6M Series A
Heron says they now process over 350,000 documents a week