Cognition acquires remainder of Windsurf

Cognition, the maker of the AI coding agent Devin, announced it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire what remained of Windsurf: its IDE product, intellectual property, trademark and brand, alongside a business Cognition said generated $82 million in annual recurring revenue from more than 350 enterprise customers and hundreds of thousands of daily active users. The deal came days after Google hired Windsurf’s chief executive Varun Mohan and other senior staff in a $2.4 billion licensing arrangement that left the rest of the company without its founding leadership.

Cognition said every remaining Windsurf employee would participate financially in the acquisition, with vesting cliffs waived and full acceleration granted for work already completed — terms explicitly framed as compensation for staff who had not been part of the Google deal. Cognition co-founder Scott Wu described the acquisition as combining Devin’s traction as an autonomous coding agent with Windsurf’s IDE product and enterprise sales infrastructure.

The sequence — Google licensing the technology and hiring the leadership rather than buying the company outright, followed within days by a rival scooping up what was left — became one of the clearest examples of the “reverse acquihire” structure that labs used through 2025 to acquire talent and technology while avoiding a full corporate acquisition and its associated liabilities and regulatory scrutiny. Cognition went on to raise further funding shortly afterward, reflecting how quickly the acquired assets were revalued once folded into an existing product line.