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In a push to enhance its AI code generation abilities, Google has hired a number of employees from Windsurf, a quickly growing AI infrastructure startup. The IT Giant has even hired Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO, Varun Mohan. He and co-founder Douglas Chen are now going to Google after a tense corporate face-off, which reportedly saw OpenAI in advanced talks to acquire Windsurf just a month ago.
Having Indian descent, Varun Mohan was raised in Sunnyvale, California. His parents migrated from India. Speaking of his educational qualification, Varun went to The Harker School in San Jose, and then to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he earned a Bachelor’s and Master of Engineering in Computer Science.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Varun Mohan co-founded Windsurf in June 2021. The startup was based in Mountain View and received attention after launching AI tools that would reduce friction and speed up the process of software development. During this time, Windsurf quickly became a prominent player in the AI infrastructure space under his leadership. As per his LinkedIn profile, he worked as a research intern at UC Santa Cruz, Stony Brook University. Furthermore, he worked as a software engineering intern at Samsung Electronics, LinkedIn, Cloudera, Quora, Cloudian Inc., Databricks, and Nuro.
Before starting Windsurf, Varun Mohan spent over three years at the autonomous vehicle company Nuro. In 2018, he joined the company as a software engineer, later was promoted to tech lead for autonomy infrastructure by August 2019. Eventually, he became the tech lead manager, Autonomy Infrastructure in 2020 at Nuro.
“Windsurf (formerly Codeium) has been developed by a team of researchers and engineers to build the future of software development,” reads the official statement on the website of Windsurf. The statement further reads, “We realized that the combination of recent advances in generative models and our world-class optimized deep learning serving software could provide users with top quality AI-based products at the lowest possible costs (or ideally, free!).”
According to WindSurf, the AI technology developed by Varun Mohan and his team is said to have fueled the competition between Google DeepMind and OpenAI. Varun was one signature away from accepting OpenAI’s $3 billion offer to purchase WindSurf, but the deal fell apart when Microsoft, OpenAI’s main investor, raised concerns about conflicts with its own product, GitHub Copilot, several media outlets reported. As a result, the deal fell apart before the finish line. Rather than accept the offer with OpenAI, Varun accepted an offer with Google, while retaining his and his management team’s role as CEO and owner of WindSurf. WindSurf operates independently and sells its technology to other customers.
IT Giant Google will pay $2.4 billion in licensing fees to access certain Windsurf technologies on a non-exclusive basis, according to Reuters, which cited a source familiar with the deal. Google won’t get any ownership or controlling stake in Windsurf.
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