Google is hiring Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and key R&D staff to join its DeepMind team, ending months of speculation about OpenAI’s reported $3 billion acquisition of the AI coding startup.
Key Points:
- Google DeepMind welcomes Windsurf’s CEO, cofounder, and R&D team.
- OpenAI’s rumored $3 billion Windsurf deal never happened.
- Windsurf’s Jeff Wang steps up as interim CEO, Graham Moreno as president.
- Google takes a non-exclusive license to Windsurf’s tech, no stake in the company.
Google announced that it’s bringing on Windsurf’s CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and a chunk of their R&D team to work on its DeepMind project, specifically on agentic coding and the Gemini model. This news kills earlier reports from outlets like TechCrunch and Bloomberg, which claimed back in March 2025 that OpenAI was buying Windsurf for a cool $3 billion. Turns out, that deal never closed.
Big welcome to @_mohansolo and others from the Windsurf team joining Deepmind : )
— Logan Kilpatrick (@OfficialLoganK) July 11, 2025
Windsurf, formerly known as Codeium, launched in 2021 and has raised over $200 million, hitting a $1.25 billion valuation last year. Its tech caught the eye of big players, sparking the OpenAI rumors. Instead, Google swooped in—but not to buy the company—to hire its top talent. Google’s also getting a non-exclusive license to some of Windsurf’s tech, but it won’t own or control the startup. The deal’s financial details? Google’s keeping that under wraps.
Just a few months ago, code-gen startups like Cursor and Windsurf were the hottest names in AI—Cursor raised $900 million at a $10 billion valuation in May, while Windsurf drew acquisition interest from OpenAI for $3 billion. Now, they are quickly falling into obscurity.
That’s largely because foundation model updates have taken back the spotlight: Anthropic launched Claude 4 in May, touting it as the “world’s best coding model” and capable of hours-long autonomous work. Google itself rolled out Gemini 2.5 earlier this year, with its “thinking” model hailed for multimodal reasoning and a massive context window. Just yesterday, xAI unveiled Grok 4 with arguably the most advanced reasoning and coding prowess.
Jeff Wang, the head of business at Windsurf, will take over as interim CEO, and Graham Moreno, VP of global sales, is stepping up as president. The company is staying independent.