The AI talent raid seems to be intensifying. Google has now onboarded several key members from Windsurf, a startup that works on AI code generation. Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of Windsurf, has been brought in along with co-founder Douglas Chen and other senior research and development staff from the company.
Talking about the latest development, Jeff Wang, Windsurf’s new interim CEO, said that most of the company’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximising its impact in the enterprise.
Windsurf, which is among the fastest-growing startups in software development workflows, was on its way to being acquired by AI powerhouse OpenAI, and was in advanced talks until last month. Interestingly, Google is not acquiring the startup but is paying a whopping $2.4 billion for a nonexclusive licence for certain Windsurf technologies, essentially allowing the company to continue to licence its tools to others.
After the talent from Windsurf joined Google, a company spokesperson said in an email, “We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding.”
Meanwhile, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis took to X to express his excitement and welcome the new members.
Thrilled to welcome @windsurf_ai founders @_mohansolo & Douglas Chen and some of the brilliant Windsurf eng team to @GoogleDeepMind. Excited to be working with them to turbocharge our Gemini efforts on coding agents, tool use and much more. Great to have you on board! https://t.co/7LZ6MtO2p4
— Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) July 11, 2025
According to earlier reports by CNBC, OpenAI and Windsurf were in talks for an acquisition deal worth $3 billion. However, with the latest agreement, Google has veered ahead, further aggravating the ongoing talent war among big tech that are currently vying for top talents and leaders in AI and innovation to further their AI strategies.
Who is Varun Mohan?
The former CEO of Windsurf, Mohan, is reportedly the child of immigrant parents from India who grew up in Sunnyvale, California. He attended the Harker School in San Jose, and as a student, he was known to demonstrate an aptitude for mathematics and computing Olympiads. Between 2014 and 2017, Mohan earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He later went on to obtain a master’s degree in engineering from MIT in 2017 with a focus on OS, algorithms, distributed computing, ML, and performance engineering.
In the formative years of his career, Mohan reportedly worked at top tech companies such as Nuro, Quora, LinkedIn, Databricks, Samsung, etc., accumulating a deep experience in software, systems, and engineering. Mohan has been widely recognised for his strong analytical skills and his ability to convert complex algorithms into production code.
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In 2021, he co-founded the company Codeium, later renamed as Windsurf, along with his MIT classmate and long-time friend Douglas Chen. The company, initially, pursued GPU virtualisation infrastructure but later moved to IDE Plugin and standalone AI-native IDE. Reportedly, under Mohan’s leadership, Windsurf acquired over one million developers in just four months after its launch. The company raised $243 million, catapulting its net worth to $1.25 billion.
Mohan is among the first to push the agentic IDE concept that brought together large language models with agentic workflows like Cascade. He strongly believes that AI will handle most routine coding, allowing engineers to focus on problem identification, system design, etc.
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