Windsurf’s remaining employees had been left in the lurch after the company’s co-founders and several engineers had been acquired by Google, but they’ve now been acquired as well.
Cognition Labs, the company behind the AI coding agent Devin, has acquired Windsurf. Cognition says that all of Windsurf’s employees will “participate financially” in the acquisition. Cognition has acquired Windsurf’s IP, product, trademark, brand, and its business.
“Cognition has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf,” Cognition posted on X. “The acquisition includes Windsurf’s IP, product, trademark and brand, and strong business. Above all, it includes Windsurf’s world-class people, whom we’re privileged to welcome to our team,” it added.
“We are also honoring their talent and hard work in building Windsurf into the great business it is today. This transaction is structured so that 100% of Windsurf employees will participate financially. They will also have all vesting cliffs waived and will receive fully accelerated vesting for their work to date,” it addeed.
“At Cognition we have focused on developing robust and secure autonomous agents, while Windsurf has pioneered the agentic IDE. Devin + Windsurf are a powerful combination for the developers we serve. 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. Cognition and Windsurf are united behind a shared vision for the future of software engineering, and there’s never been a better time to build,” Cognition Labs added.
Cognition could be an ideal home for Windsurf. Cognition’s Devin product is an automated coder that costs as much as $2000 per month, and is designed to autonomously perform the tasks of a software engineer. Windsurf, on the other hand, is an IDE that helps human coders use AI to write code more efficiently. Cognition Labs seems to want to get Devin to use Windsurf and help coders automate even greater parts of their workflows.
Cognition’s acquisition of Windsurf also puts an end to the Windsurf saga, which has seen it lurch from company to company in recent months. Last month, it had been widely reported that Windsurf had been acquired by OpenAI. This had caused companies like Anthropic to pull their models from Windsurf, given how it was owned by a competitor. But Windsurf and OpenAI hadn’t officially announced the acquisition. It had later been reported that Microsoft, which is the biggest investor in OpenAI, had issues with the deal. Two days ago, the deal officially fell through, and Google acquired licensing rights to Windsurf’s technology for $2.4 billion, and Windsurf’s co-founders joined Google along with many Windsurf engineers. This left Windsurf’s remaining employees — which numbered around 250 — in the lurch, as they’d likely end up not making much money in the Google deal. But Cognition Labs has now acquired all of Windsurf, along with its remaining employees, which means that the curtains appear to have finally fallen on this entire saga which has kept the AI world captivated for weeks.