Explore Cognition AI’s acquisition of Windsurf and its impact on AI, software development, and employee ownership in the tech industry.

In a surprising move, Cognition– the makers of autonomous coding tool Devin— acquired what was left of its rival Windsurf after the company’s cofounders Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen and other staff members were poached by Google DeepMind for $2.

As of Friday, Windsurf’s head of business, Jeff Wang, will take over as the startup’s interim CEO, he announced in a post on social media. Most of Windsurf’s 250 person team is not headed to Google DeepMind and will continue offering its AI coding tools for enterprise customers.

Google hired Windsurf’s core team and licensed its AI tech for $2.4B to support agentic coding in DeepMind’s Gemini project.

Bay Area tech companies are battling to build popular, useful artificial intelligence — and the fight just ripped apart a startup. Windsurf, an AI company based in Mountain View, began last week as a reported $3 billion acquisition target for OpenAI.

The acquihire-on-steroids trend is unique to this tech boom, and could have big implications for current and future AI founders.