Within just a week, Windsurf has managed to avoid acquisition attempts from OpenAI not once, but twice. This rapid turn of events highlights the intense interest surrounding this innovative AI company.
Back in April, industry insiders believed that a potential merger or buyout was on the horizon. By May, it was widely speculated that the deal could be worth approximately $3 billion. Although these discussions seemed plausible, they did not come to fruition. The period during which Windsurf was under an exclusivity agreement appears to have recently ended, allowing the company to explore other offers. Notably, offers from tech giants like Google and Cognition AI are now on the table.
Google was the first to act decisively, investing $2.4 billion to secure a non-exclusive license to certain Windsurf products and to acquire key talent—starting with Varun Mohan, the company’s CEO—specifically to bolster its DeepMind division.
Following this announcement, Cognition AI formally confirmed that it has completed a final agreement to acquire Windsurf’s assets, including its products, intellectual property, trademarks, and teams. The company did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.
Windsurf Regains Full Access to the Claude Models
Founded in 2021 under the name Codeium, Windsurf emerged as a unicorn in summer 2024 following a funding round led by General Catalyst. By the end of that year, Gartner classified Windsurf among the “challengers” in its inaugural Magic Quadrant for code assistant tools. It was positioned alongside major players such as IBM and Alibaba Cloud, while the “leaders” included AWS, GitHub, GitLab, and Google Cloud. The research firm praised Windsurf for several key attributes, including:
- Its commitment to responsible AI development—training on code with permissive licenses
- Support for multiple IDEs, programming languages, and frameworks
- Flexible deployment options—cloud-based, self-hosted, or hybrid
- Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
- The company’s resilience—ample cash reserves prudently managed and an announced customer retention rate of 100%
Windsurf claims to serve approximately 350 enterprise clients and hundreds of thousands of daily users, generating an annual recurring revenue of $82 million. The company asserts that under Cognition AI’s umbrella, it will enjoy “full access” to the Claude models. This is significant because Anthropic, Windsurf’s previous provider of Claude models, had limited access in anticipation of a potential acquisition by OpenAI.
Cognition AI, the parent company of Windsurf, develops its own AI assistant known as Devin. Since its last funding round at the beginning of 2025, Cognition AI’s valuation is estimated to be around $4 billion.
