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Autonomous AI coding startup Cognition has signed a definitive settlement to accumulate Windsurf, the AI developer instruments startup finest recognized for its agentic built-in growth surroundings (IDE). The 2 firms made the announcement on their respective X accounts on Monday. No acquisition quantity was disclosed publicly, nor had been particular phrases of the deal (each are non-public startups).
The acquisition offers Cognition entry to Windsurf’s core product, model and remaining workforce — however not its unique CEO or co-founders, a number of of whom have joined Google in a separate $2.4 billion expertise and licensing deal, as The Verge first reported final week.
In a joint video posted to X that includes Cognition CEO Scott Wu and interim Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang, the leaders stated they’d begin by integrating Cognition’s autonomous AI-powered engineer Devin into Windsurf’s IDE.
This mixed providing is geared toward enabling builders to plan duties, delegate code era to AI brokers and evaluate pull requests — all inside a single interface.
“This can be a excellent match,” stated Wang, who was beforehand Windsurf’s head of enterprise. “Working with the perfect engineering workforce within the house will likely be an unbelievable unlock for our product and our go-to-market workforce.”
In an organization weblog put up titled “The Subsequent Chapter,” Wang straight acknowledged the interior upheaval: “Final week, we misplaced our founders and our analysis workforce.”
He praised the remaining employees for his or her professionalism in the course of the transition and emphasised that regardless of the disruption, “a lot of what makes us nice is unbroken.”
In response to Wang, Windsurf continues to double enterprise income quarter-over-quarter and maintains tons of of hundreds of every day energetic customers.
Cognition emphasised that the deal contains full monetary participation for Windsurf workers, together with waived cliffs and accelerated vesting.
Wang additionally acknowledged within the announcement video: “And naturally, we’re mates with Anthropic once more,” an overt reference to Windsurf’s prior falling out with the separate AI mannequin supplier firm that resulted in Anthropic Claude fashions being pulled from the listing of choices that builders may depend on to energy their Windsurf AI coding brokers and processes.
However the brand new chapter follows a chaotic and fragmented few months marked by aborted acquisition talks, misplaced mannequin entry and main govt departures.
Fragmented exit: Cognition will get the product and customers, Google will get the founders
On July 11, Google confirmed it had employed Varun Mohan, Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO, together with different senior R&D workforce members.
CNBC reported that Google is paying $2.4 billion in compensation and licensing charges as a part of the deal, which features a nonexclusive license to pick out Windsurf know-how.
The deal does not embody any fairness funding in Windsurf, nor a full acquisition of the corporate.
“We’re excited to welcome some high AI coding expertise from Windsurf’s workforce to Google DeepMind,” a Google spokesperson instructed CNBC.
Windsurf, in the meantime, retains the power to license its know-how and can proceed working independently underneath Wang’s management.
The cut up construction displays a fragmented decision to what had earlier been reported as a full-scale acquisition by OpenAI.
Bloomberg reported again in Might that OpenAI had entered exclusivity negotiations to purchase Windsurf for as much as $3 billion. Nevertheless, these talks fell aside, and OpenAI later instructed CNBC that the exclusivity interval had expired.
Whereas the corporate by no means formally confirmed the OpenAI acquisition, the fallout was seen — Windsurf’s communications channels went silent, its product skilled instability and a number of companions reportedly backed away.
Buddies with Anthropic but once more
Among the many most damaging blows got here from Anthropic, which revoked Windsurf’s entry to its Claude 3 mannequin household in early June.
In a press release revealed on its weblog, Windsurf confirmed that Anthropic had minimize off practically all first-party API capability to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and associated fashions with lower than every week’s discover.
In response, Windsurf needed to reroute visitors by third-party inference suppliers and limit entry for free-tier customers. The corporate additionally launched promotional pricing for Gemini Professional as a brief substitute.
Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan defined the choice at TechCrunch Periods: AI 2025, saying the corporate couldn’t justify supplying its largest competitor, OpenAI, with entry to its fashions by way of a center layer.
“It might be odd for us to promote Claude to OpenAI,” he stated, citing each aggressive rigidity and Anthropic’s restricted compute capability. Kaplan added that Anthropic prefers to deal with “lasting partnerships” just like the one it maintains with Cursor.
Windsurf, in its assertion, expressed disappointment and emphasised that its platform is about extra than simply mannequin entry. “The magic of Windsurf has by no means been restricted to the mannequin,” the corporate wrote, highlighting UX options, enterprise integrations and agentic workflows.
A brand new product imaginative and prescient for the mixed Windsurf/Cognition/Devin
Cognition’s settlement now brings long-needed readability to Windsurf’s operational path. In a video asserting the deal, Wu’s Cognition described how the 2 platforms will combine: “Think about planning duties in Windsurf, launching a workforce of Devins, and reviewing PRs from the consolation of your IDE.”
Devin, which may autonomously full software program duties corresponding to fixing bugs and deploying apps, will now be embedded straight into Windsurf’s IDE.
The businesses say this setup will give builders the power to dump repetitive work to a number of brokers in parallel, whereas nonetheless retaining management over key architectural selections.
Cognition views this as the subsequent step in constructing collaborative human-agent techniques, and says Windsurf’s IDE offers the lacking interface layer to make agentic workflows sensible at scale. Each firms expressed confidence that customers will profit from a extra fluid, tightly built-in growth expertise.
The Windsurf weblog put up additionally expanded on product-level plans, confirming that Windsurf’s current options like Tab and Cascade — used for handbook high-leverage coding — will stay built-in within the IDE.
Builders will be capable to assign work to “a workforce of Devins” whereas nonetheless leaping in to finish or edit complicated components themselves. “It seamlessly will get stitched again collectively all throughout the similar surroundings,” Wang wrote.
Consolidation amid competitors
The mixed Cognition-Windsurf entity now competes straight with GitHub Copilot, Replit, Cursor and different AI-native IDE gamers. Google’s Gemini platform and Microsoft’s Visible Studio Code with “agent mode” are additionally increasing quickly into this house.
Devin made headlines earlier this 12 months due to its means to autonomously remedy GitHub points and full end-to-end coding duties. Merging that functionality with Windsurf’s customizable surroundings — together with options like Previews, Critiques and Enterprise workflows — might create a product with fewer silos and extra automation than rivals.
Nonetheless, the continuing expertise warfare means aggressive benefit is short-lived. Google’s means to rent Windsurf’s founding workforce — together with Mohan and co-founder Douglas Chen — alerts that even partial exits now include multibillion-dollar value tags. Meta, Amazon and Microsoft have made comparable strikes, absorbing key figures from startups like Scale AI, Adept and Inflection.
Regardless of the management shake-up, Windsurf is constant operations underneath Wang’s management.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class workforce will proceed to construct the Windsurf product with the objective of maximizing its affect within the enterprise,” he stated in a press release.
Wang additionally emphasised that the workforce selected Cognition over different viable choices, citing not solely technical alignment however admiration: “They had been the one workforce we had been petrified of.”
He famous that Cognition’s income is rising even sooner than Windsurf’s, and that its $300 million in funding and $4 billion valuation mirror robust monetary footing.
The corporate is predicted to deal with enterprise readiness, agentic IDE capabilities and hybrid/federated deployments — core options which have helped it stand out in a crowded subject.
For builders, the trail ahead now contains each continuity and alter: A product that stays alive inside Cognition, a founding workforce now at DeepMind and a panorama shortly consolidating round mannequin entry and engineering expertise.
