Who is Varun Mohan, Windsurf CEO just hired by Google?
What's the story
Google has hired Varun Mohan, the CEO of AI code generation start-up Windsurf (originally Codeium). The move comes after rival OpenAI was in advanced talks to acquire Windsurf as recently as June. Instead of acquiring the company, Google opted for a non-exclusive license for certain Windsurf technologies, according to Reuters. Along with Mohan, Douglas Chen (co-founder of Windsurf), and other senior research and development (R&D) staff from Windsurf have also joined Google's DeepMind division.
Company evolution
Windsor has over a million developers worldwide
Windsurf, formerly known as Codeium, was co-founded by Mohan and Chen in 2021. The company has grown rapidly under Mohan's leadership, attracting over a million developers worldwide. Windsurf provides an AI-powered integrated development environment (IDE) that helps engineers automate repetitive coding tasks and focus on higher-level problem-solving. Its main feature, the "Cascade" agent, automates everything from writing and refactoring code to running commands across large codebases.
Personal history
Mohan's educational background and career journey
Mohan, who has Indian roots, grew up in Sunnyvale, California. He studied at The Harker School in San Jose before earning a Bachelor of Science (BS) and Master of Engineering (MEng) in Computer Science from MIT. Mohan started his career on GPU virtualization tools and worked at companies like Nuro, Databricks, Quora, and LinkedIn before co-founding Windsurf. Under Mohan's leadership, Windsurf attracted over a million developers within months of launch and raised $243 million, boosting its valuation to $1.25 billion.
Twitter Post
DeepMind CEO welcomes Mohan and others
Thrilled to welcome @windsurf_ai founders @_mohansolo & Douglas Chen and some of the brilliant Windsurf eng team to @GoogleDeepMind. Excited to be working with them to turbocharge our Gemini efforts on coding agents, tool use and much more. Great to have you on board! https://t.co/7LZ6MtO2p4
— Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) July 11, 2025
Market competition
Windsurf competes with GitHub Copilot and Cursor
Windsurf stands out from other artificial intelligence (AI) coding tools by functioning as a full IDE instead of a plugin. This gives it more control and lower latency. The company competes with GitHub Copilot and new entrants like Cursor by offering granular model customization and making AI coding assistants available to non-technical teams. Mohan's vision is to push engineers toward strategic design thinking rather than line-by-line implementation.