Devin Creator Cognition Acquires Windsurf After Google Poaches Its Founders

Cognition, a San Francisco–based AI company, has finalised an agreement to acquire Windsurf, including its IP, product, trademark, and full workforce. 

“This transaction is structured so that 100% of Windsurf employees will participate financially,” Cognition said in a statement. “They will also have all vesting cliffs waived and will receive fully accelerated vesting for their work to date.”

This development follows Google DeepMind’s hiring of Windsurf’s CEO Varun Mohan, co‑founder Douglas Chen, and key R&D personnel under a $2.4 billion licensing agreement.

Cognition Labs is an applied AI lab founded in November 2023 by Olympiad gold‑medalist programmers Scott Wu, Steven Hao, and Walden Yan. Its flagship product is Devin, marketed as the first autonomous AI software engineer that can plan, write, debug, and deploy code within IDE environments.

Cognition said the combination of its AI agent Devin with Windsurf’s IDE platform will support developers in planning, delegating, and executing code tasks within a single interface.

“Working side by side, we’ll soon enable you to plan tasks in an IDE powered by Devin’s codebase understanding, delegate chunks of work to multiple Devins in parallel, complete the highest-leverage parts yourself with the help of autocomplete, and stitch it all back together in the same IDE,” the company said.

Windsurf’s team, along with its platform, is expected to integrate with Cognition’s broader efforts to reshape software development through AI-native tools.

“We’re privileged to welcome their world-class people to our team,” Cognition said. “There’s never been a better time to build.”

While Cognition acquires Windsurf as a standalone business, Google has secured a non‑exclusive license to Windsurf’s technology and onboarded Mohan, Chen, and select R&D staff into its DeepMind division, primarily to bolster its Gemini AI coding project.