Explore Cognition AI’s acquisition of Windsurf and its impact on AI, software development, and employee ownership in the tech industry.

In a surprising move, Cognition– the makers of autonomous coding tool Devin— acquired what was left of its rival Windsurf after the company’s cofounders Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen and other staff members were poached by Google DeepMind for $2.

Cognition CEO Scott Wu and interim Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang said they would start by integrating the AI-powered engineer Devin into Windsurf.

For years, code-editing tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and GitHub’s Copilot have been the standard for AI-powered software development. But as agentic AI grows more powerful and vibe-coding takes off, a subtle shift has changed how AI systems are interacting with software.

Google hired Windsurf’s core team and licensed its AI tech for $2.4B to support agentic coding in DeepMind’s Gemini project.

In an unexpected turn of events, artificial intelligence startup Cognition announced this week that it is acquiring AI coding startup Windsurf, just days after news that OpenAI’s planned $3 billion buy of Windsurf had fallen apart.

Windsurf is an AI-powered developer tool that enables users to build full-stack applications using natural language prompts. They compete with Cursor and