Artificial intelligence (AI) coding startup Windsurf announced Monday that it was being acquired by Cognition, an AI peer based out of San Francisco, California.
This comes close on the heels of Windsurf disclosing a licensing agreement with Alphabet, Inc. (GOOGL) (GOOG) unit Google’s DeepMind and the hiring of its co-founders Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen, along with some researchers by the Sundar Pichai-led company.
On Monday, the Alphabet stock rose 0.76% to $181.56, outperforming its mega-cap tech peers.
Announcing the decision to sell, Jeff Wang, who took over the reins from Mohan last week, said, “Our world-class team will be joining forces with the iconic company that created Devin, the world’s first autonomous software engineering agent.”
Wang also said Windsurf’s unique IP will be integrated into Congnition, “helping the joint team continue to push the frontier of AI coding capabilities.”
Addressing the Windsurf team, Wang said Cognition’s revenue growth is extraordinary,“ calling it even faster than the former’s breakneck pace. He noted that Cognition has raised over $400 million from Founders Fund and others, and was recently valued at $4 billion, with a strong balance sheet and a stronger customer book and pipeline.
Before the Google partnership, Windsurf was also courted by Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, the maker of the hugely popular ChatGPT large-language model (LLM). Talks proved unsuccessful after Microsoft, a major OpenAI investor, wasn’t pleased with Windsurf’s condition to keep its IP out of the software giant’s reach.
Scott Wu, Cognition CEO, said the Windsurf acquisition includes Windsurf’s IP, product, trademark, and brand, as well as its strong business and world-class team.
“What this means for Cognition is that we’ll be able to move even faster on our mission of building the future of software engineering,” Wu said.
“As our customer base continues to grow, it’s clear that combining the rapid adoption of Devin as the leading fully autonomous agent with Windsurf’s IDE product and scaled GTM machine will be a massive unlock.”
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