USA (Commonwealth Union)_ Google has silently brought on board key members of Windsurf, a fast-growing AI infrastructure startup, as part of a strategic move to boost its AI code generation capabilities. At the heart of this transition is Varun Mohan, Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO, who is now joining Google alongside co-founder Douglas Chen. The move comes just weeks after reports surfaced that OpenAI was in serious talks to acquire Windsurf. But, Google made a decisive play, hiring away the startup’s top talent in what many see as a competitive win in the race for AI leadership.
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Mohan, who is an Indian-origin techie, was raised in Sunnyvale, California. His parents are immigrants from India, and he had his earlier education in The Harker School in San Jose before heading to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There, he graduated with dual degrees, a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in computer science and engineering. Later, in 2021, Mohan co-founded Windsurf in Mountain View. The business soon established a reputation for developing innovative AI solutions to assist simplify the software development process. Under his efficient leadership, Windsurf emerged as a standout in the highly competitive AI infrastructure space.
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Under Mohan’s leadership, Windsurf onboarded over a million developers in four months, drew $243 million in investment, and was valued at $1.25 billion. Its main innovation is agentic workflows, in which AI technologies automate everyday operations, freeing engineers to focus on design and strategy. Before the launch of Windsurf, Mohan worked at Nuro, the self-driving vehicle company. He joined in 2018 as a software engineer and eventually became the tech lead for autonomy infrastructure.
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By 2020, he was leading teams as a tech lead manager. His earlier experience includes engineering internships at Databricks, Cloudian, and Quora, where he contributed to machine learning and data systems. While OpenAI expressed a great interest in acquiring Windsurf, it was Google who finally won the bid. According to reports, Google has agreed to pay $2.4 billion in license fees to access some parts of Windsurf’s technology, but will not acquire any stock or ownership position in the firm. Accordingly, Mohan and his colleagues will now join Google DeepMind, where they will work on agentic coding projects for the Gemini AI tool. Their efforts are expected to influence Google’s next generation of AI tools and developer platforms.
