Google hires Windsurf's CEO and top staff in $2.4B deal

Google agreed to pay $2.4 billion for a non-exclusive licence to technology from Windsurf, the AI coding-assistant startup, structuring the deal so that CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and roughly 40 of the company’s researchers and engineers joined Google DeepMind rather than Google acquiring Windsurf itself. About half the sum reportedly went to compensation packages for the hired staff, with a substantial share going to Mohan and Chen personally.

The arrangement followed the collapse of a reported $3 billion deal for OpenAI to acquire Windsurf outright; the companies had entered an exclusivity period to finalise that acquisition, which lapsed without a deal closing. By licensing technology and hiring key people instead of buying the company, Google avoided the antitrust review and shareholder process a full acquisition would have triggered — a structure that had already appeared earlier in 2025 when Microsoft hired much of Inflection AI’s staff without buying the company, and that Meta used for its Scale AI deal.

Windsurf itself did not fold: days later, rival coding-tools company Cognition announced it would acquire what remained of Windsurf, including its product, brand and remaining staff, absorbing the assets Google’s deal had left behind. The episode illustrated how frontier labs were competing for individual researchers and small teams as much as for companies, treating acquihire structures as a way to secure talent quickly while sidestepping the deal-review processes attached to conventional M&A.