Varun mohan: A new talent war in the world of Artificial Intelligence is emerging fast. This time its center has become the center of Varun Mohan Windsurf and former CEO. Recently, Google has associated Varun Mohan from Windsurf to his co-founder Douglas Chen and the company’s senior R&D staff. However, Windsurf is still active and according to its new interim CEO Jeff Wang, the company’s core team will continue to develop its enterprise tools further.
Google won on windsurf
Windsurf is a rapidly growing AI startup that focuses on code generation. It was reported that Openai is going to buy this company for about $ 3 billion but Google took a shocking step before the deal was completed.
Google bought a non-exclusive license of $ 2.4 billion for some Windsurf techniques, allowing Windsurf to sell their technology to other companies as well. Although this is not an acquisition, Google has run a big bet by including Windsurf’s AI team in Deepmind.
Thrilled to welcome @windsurf_ai founders @_mohanth & Douglas Chen and some of the brilliant Windsurf eng team to @GoogleDeepMind. Excited to be working with them to turbocharge our Gemini efforts on coding agents, tool use and much more. Great to have you on board! https://t.co/7LZ6MtO2p4
– Demis Hassabus (@demishabisabis) July 11, 2025
CEO Damis Hasabis of Google Deepmind welcomed this new team on X (East Twitter) and described it as a big step towards taking “Agentic Coding” forward.
Who is Varun Mohan?
Varun Mohan, former CEO of Windsurf, is a child of Indian migrant parents and grew up in the city of Sunnyvel, California. He studied at San Jose’s The Harkar School, where he went to Maths and Computer Olympiad for his talent.
Education with mit
Between 2014 and 2017, he took a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and also completed Masters in 2017, with his focus on operating systems, machine learning, distributed computing and algorithm.
Varun Mohan started his career by working in big tech companies like Nuro, Quora, LinkedIn, Databricks and Samsung. He was identified as an engineer who has the mastery of converting complex algorithms into a real product code.
Story of windsurf
In 2021, Varun started a startup named Codeium with his Mit’s classmate and friend Douglas Chen, which later got the name Windsurf. Initially the company worked on GPU virtue, but later focused on AI-Natural IDE and IDE plugins. In Varun’s leadership, Windsurf added more than 1 million developers in just 4 months and got a $ 1.25 billion valuation by getting a $ 243 million funding.
New era of agentic IDE
Varun Mohan is one of the early people who put up the “Agentic Ide” concept in which LLMS (Large Language Models) was associated with agent workflows such as Cascade. He believes that in the coming time, AI will handle the boring things of coding and engineers will pay attention to innovation and system design.
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