In a dramatic turn in the arms race of the IA of the intensification of Silicon Valley, Cognition Labs – The startup behind the Soft software engineer – acquired the remaining Windsurfing assets, just days after Google harvested the CEO of the company and key researchers in a license and a talent transaction.
Cognition announced on Monday that it took control of the intellectual property of Windsurf, the stack of products, corporate contracts, brand rights and remaining staff. Although the financial conditions were not disclosed, the acquisition actually closes the loop on a startup which, only months ago, was in talks to be acquired by Openai during an evaluation of $ 3 billion.
The dramatic split marks the last maneuver of what has become a high show with high issues for the talents of artificial intelligence and the code generation infrastructure, in particular while the technology giants rush to create tools that automatize large -scale software engineering tasks. Windsurf, a rising star in the AI coding space, had built a complete FDI propelled by models of owners designed to write, test and send code with a minimum of human surveillance.
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Openai talks to acquire Windsurfs collapsed earlier this year, due to complications resulting from Microsoft’s close partnership with the laboratory. The collapse of the agreement opened the door to Google, which announced last Friday that it had hired the co-founder and CEO of Windsurf, Varun Mohan, with chief scientist Douglas Chen and several other senior developers. In exchange, Google has agreed to pay massive fees of $ 2.4 billion to obtain an engine generation engine license from Windsurf and compensate for its new hires.
But Google’s agreement did not cover the whole business. This has left the remaining Windsurf team, product infrastructure and corporate customers – comprising more than 350 paid customers and 80 million dollars in recurring income – on the table. The cognition acquisition fills this gap.
The CEO of cognition, Scott Wu, in a staff service note, described this decision as a unifying moment for the two companies, saying that all the incoming employees of the windsurfing will also be treated with existing staff. The memo has emphasized the financial participation of the acquired team, has given up acquiring cliffs and fully accelerating equity as part of the agreement – an effort to ensure morale and retention after a few turbulent months.
The acquisition gives cognition access to an IDE of industrial quality and deep integration tools which will now be woven in Devin, a autonomous software engineer of the company. It positions the cognition of pushing further in the “agent coding” border – a new class of AI tools which do not only help developers but write, debute and submit code independently. The company aims to consolidate both code generation and deployment in a single environment powered by AI which could fundamentally move the economy of software development.
For Google, the move indicates a renewed commitment to its Gemini AI suite, which should obtain new important capacities of the talent and the licenses of the board board. The integration of Winsurf Backend models could help Google catch up on the market of rapidly evolving AI tools, where the GitHub co -pilot supported by Microsoft and the Amazon Codewhisper currently have a significant traction.
The history of Windsurf also highlights the new dynamic of startup acquisitions at the time of AI. The founders and key engineers are increasingly precious than the startups themselves, often causing “split” agreements where companies are actually divided – going to one company, a technology to another. He also underlines how the race to have an AI coding infrastructure has gone from startup playgrounds to $ 1 billion conference room decisions.
What started as a promising startup with solid support from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Greenoaaks, and Kleiner Perkins, has now become the centerpiece of a wider reshuffle in the AI coding space. Cognition, having now inherited the main assets of Windisurf, should unveil the first integrated version of the IDE of Devin and Windisurf later this year. Google, on the other hand, is likely to highlight the improvements of the Gemini fueled by Winsurf at its next developer conference.
The agreement highlights the emerging reality of the AI arms race: the battle no longer concerns which builds the best model, but which controls the complete ecosystem – of code writing agents to the infrastructure that supports them. And in this new paradigm, even a fractured acquisition can be a strategic master stroke.
