Google has hired Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan and other senior research and development employees for $2.4 billion. As part of the acquisition of key talent, Google has also gained a non-exclusive license to Windsurf’s technology, but it isn’t acquiring the company outright.
For those scratching their heads wondering what happened to the OpenAI acquisition of Windsurf, that deal didn’t end up completing in time and expired. OpenAI had concerns about Microsoft’s IP rights and the access it would have to Windsurf if the deal went ahead so it pulled out.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
For anyone not familiar, Windsurf is a revolutionary new integrated development environment (IDE) that lets you write code. Revolutionary here isn"t being used in a promotional sense either, it fundamentally changes how you write code, and more importantly, who can write code.
Rather than needing to know the syntax of a programming language, Windsurf allows you to just tell the AI what you’re aiming for using normal language and then it will go out and try to do what you want. You can always tell it that it has not done something properly then it’ll attempt to fix it. This opens up programming to people who have no coding experience and those who may have tried coding in the past but couldn"t grasp it properly.
This “vibe coding” isn’t unique to Windsurf, both Microsoft and Google offer extensions to editors like Visual Studio Code, and editors like Cursor with tight AI integration exist too. Windsurf was unique because it was built from the ground-up with AI tied in and was very generous with its free tier.
For those who want to continue writing code, Windsurf offers other AI features like basic auto-completion tools, which can speed up development time for professional developers who have a better idea of what the code does.
The acquisition of AI talent from Windsurf is part of a larger trend among tech giants. Google’s Gemini, especially since the 2.0 series, has come on in leaps and bounds, easily overtaking ChatGPT in some respects, especially when it comes to the things you can do on the free tier.
This latest development will help Google to ensure Gemini is also a very good coding assistant for developers and better compete with the likes of Microsoft and Cursor.
One of the concerns about OpenAI’s planned acquisition was whether the free Windsurf tier would continue to be as generous. While Google hasn’t bought Windsurf, the acquisition of talent, especially the CEO, raises some concerns. If you remember back last year, you may remember the AI startup Inflection which was trying to build an AI focusing on EQ rather than IQ; less smart, more empathetic.
Microsoft swooped in and acquired the head of Inflection for its own AI designs. This led to a huge pivot for Inflection where it decided to just focus on business customers and essentially abandoned its Pi AI, although it’s still accessible.
Windsurf is a good code editor and has been attracting lots of users recently, hopefully it’ll be able to focus on its mission and continue offering what it has been to date. With that said, Google is quite good at offering AI features for free too, but sooner or later it’ll want to monetize those services with ads, just like it has been aggressively doing with YouTube in recent years.
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