As technology giants continue paving the way for new advancements in AI, Windsurf, a software company that developed an AI coding assistant, has been sought after by some major players. Cognition, a company building end-to-end software agents, confirmed its acquisition of Windsurf on Monday after a $3 billion deal between OpenAI and Windsurf cratered last week, as reported by The Verge.
Google has been in the mix as well. Prior to the Cognition acquisition, Varun Mohan, CEO of Windsurf, joined Google following a $2.4 billion licensing deal between the companies. Alongside Mohan, Google brought on additional senior research and development employees, including Windsurf co-founder Douglas Chen. Google also obtained licenses to certain Windsurf technology, according to reporting by CNBC.
Cognition’s goal is to build collaborative AI teammates to augment certain engineering work, allowing human talent to focus on more complex tasks. The company’s AI software engineer agent Devin is able to assist with front-end bugs, building SaaS integrations, ticket resolution, performance optimization and more.
Following the acquisition, Cognition has expanded its reach to Windsurf’s customer base of more than 350 enterprises and hundreds of thousands of daily active users. Additionally, it has gained access to the latest Claude models through Windsurf’s integrated development environment.
“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,” Scott Wu, Cognition’s CEO, said in a company blog post. “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.”
Equipped with Windsurf’s intellectual property, product, trademark, team and brand, Cognition plans to continue pursuing its existing development goals with Devin before eventually integrating Windsurf’s capabilities and IP into its products.
