Codeium (Windsurf)

Codeium built the AI coding assistant Codeium and the agentic IDE Windsurf. Known for its generous free tier and fast autocomplete, Codeium grew to 800,000+ developers. A reported ~$3B OpenAI acquisition collapsed on 11 July 2025 when the exclusivity period lapsed; Google then paid around $2.4B in a non-exclusive licensing deal that took co-founders Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen and part of the R&D team to DeepMind, and Cognition AI acquired the remaining business — IP, product, brand, 350+ enterprise customers and about $82M of ARR — on 14 July 2025 on undisclosed terms. Windsurf's Cascade agent autonomously edits code across entire repositories.

1. 2021Founded as Exafunction, building GPU infrastructure
2. 2022Pivoted to AI coding; Codeium launched free vs GitHub Copilot
3. 2023100K+ developers; VS Code / JetBrains extensions
4. Nov 2024Windsurf IDE launched — agentic coding with Cascade agent
5. 2025800K+ developers; Series C at $1.25B valuation
6. Jul 2025A reported ~$3B OpenAI acquisition lapsed (11 Jul); Google licensed the technology and hired the CEO and research leaders; Cognition acquired the company (14 Jul) on undisclosed terms
7. Jun 2026Cognition renamed Windsurf to Devin Desktop (2 Jun)

• Windsurf IDE
• Codeium Extension (VS Code / JetBrains / Vim)
• Cascade Agent
• Windsurf API