Who Is Varun Mohan? Google Hires Windsurf CEO, Triggering OpenAI Talent Clash

Last Updated:July 12, 2025, 20:43 IST

Google has strengthened its AI team by hiring Windsurf co-founders Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen. They secured a $2.4 billion deal for a nonexclusive license to Windsurf's AI tech.

Who Is Varun Mohan? Google Hires Windsurf CEO, Triggers Talent War With Open AI. (LinkedIn)

Google has intensified its AI talent hunt. It has onboarded key members from Windsurf, an AI code generation startup. Varun Mohan, Windsurf’s co-founder and CEO, has been brought in along with co-founder Douglas Chen and other senior research and development staff from the company.

While speaking about the latest development, Jeff Wang, Windsurf’s new interim CEO, said that most of the company’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product to maximise its impact in the enterprise.

Windsurf, a rapidly growing software development startup, was on its way to being acquired by AI powerhouse OpenAI, and was in advanced talks until last month. However, Google has swooped in with a $2.4 billion deal for a nonexclusive license to Windsurf’s AI technologies, allowing the startup to license its tools to others.

“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding," a company spokesperson said in an email after the talent from Windsurf joined Google.

Meanwhile, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis took to X to express his excitement and welcome the new members.

According to earlier reports by CNBC, OpenAI and Windsurf were negotiating a $3 billion acquisition deal, but Google outmanoeuvred them with its $2.4 billion licensing agreement. This move escalates the talent war among tech giants competing for top AI talent and leaders to advance their AI strategies, the Indian Express reported.

The former CEO of Windsurf, Mohan, is reportedly the child of immigrant parents from India who grew up in Sunnyvale, California. He attended the Harker School in San Jose, and as a student, he was known to demonstrate an aptitude for mathematics and computing Olympiads. Varun holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT (2014-2017) and a master’s degree in engineering from MIT (2017), specializing in operating systems, algorithms, distributed computing, machine learning, and performance engineering.

Early in his career, Varun gained extensive experience in software, systems, and engineering at top tech firms including Nuro, Quora, LinkedIn, Databricks, and Samsung. He’s renowned for his strong analytical skills and his ability to convert complex algorithms into production code.

He co-founded the company Codeium in 2021, later renamed as Windsurf, along with his MIT classmate and long-time friend, Douglas Chen. The company initially pursued GPU virtualisation infrastructure but later moved to IDE Plugin and a standalone AI-native IDE. Under Varun’s leadership, Windsurf reportedly onboarded over 1 million developers within four months of launch and raised $243 million, propelling its valuation to $1.25 billion.

Mohan is among the first to push the agentic IDE concept that brought together large language models with agentic workflows like Cascade. He believed that AI will automate routine coding tasks, freeing engineers to concentrate on higher-level work like problem identification and system design.

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