Google’s licensing deal with the start-up comes after a possible acquisition by OpenAI fell through.
Google has reportedly paid a hefty sum to license Windsurf’s tech and hire the start-up’s top dogs.
In a statement last week, Windsurf announced an agreement between the two companies which would see the start-up’s co-founder Douglas Chen and CEO Varun Mohan moving to Google DeepMind.
And along with the higher-ups, Google has also poached some of Windsurf’s R&D team.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal is valued at roughly $2.4bn. As per the deal, the Big Tech giant will also have non-exclusive rights to use Windsurf’s artificial intelligence coding tech, meaning, the start-up is open to continue business as is and license its tech to other enterprises.
Google’s licensing and hiring deal with Windsurf comes after a possible OpenAI acquisition of the start-up fell through.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” Google told news outlets.
“We are excited to be joining Google DeepMind along with some of the Windsurf team,” the outgoing co-founder and CEO told Tech Crunch. “We are proud of what Windsurf has built over the last four years and are excited to see it move forward with their world class team and kick-start the next phase.”
In the interim, Windsurf’s head of business Jeff Wang will be stepping in as CEO while Graham Moreno, the start-up’s vice president of Global Sales, will take over as the company president.
This is the latest in the ongoing mass talent hunt for AI in Big Tech. Last week, Meta managed to hire Apple’s AI lead Ruoming Pang in a blow to the iPhone-maker.
This came just after the company hired Daniel Gross, the CEO and co-founder of Safe Superintelligence to its Meta Superintelligence Lab, and invested more than $14bn in Scale AI, hiring the start-up’s CEO Alexandr Wang to the newly founded AI team.
On the other hand, Microsoft managed to poach Meta’s former engineering chief Jay Parikh to lead its AI group. While in 2024, the company hired Google DeepMind’s co-founder Mustafa Suleyman to lead Microsoft AI.
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.