In a surprising move, Cognition– the makers of autonomous coding tool Devin— acquired what was left of its rival Windsurf after the company’s cofounders Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen and other staff members were poached by Google DeepMind for $2.

As of Friday, Windsurf’s head of business, Jeff Wang, will take over as the startup’s interim CEO, he announced in a post on social media. Most of Windsurf’s 250 person team is not headed to Google DeepMind and will continue offering its AI coding tools for enterprise customers.

Bay Area tech companies are battling to build popular, useful artificial intelligence — and the fight just ripped apart a startup. Windsurf, an AI company based in Mountain View, began last week as a reported $3 billion acquisition target for OpenAI.

Google hired Windsurf’s core team and licensed its AI tech for $2.4B to support agentic coding in DeepMind’s Gemini project.

Alphabet's Google has hired several key staff members from AI code generation startup Windsurf, the companies announced on Friday, in a surprise move following an attempt by its rival OpenAI to acquire the startup.

In one of the largest acqui-hires to date, Meta last month recruited Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, along with members of his team, to join a newly formed A.I. group. The move followed Meta’s investment of more than $14 billion in Scale AI, through which it secured a non-voting stake in the startup.

B deal with the artificial intelligence code generation tool company Windsurf for its licensing rights and talent will likely increase competition in the DevSecOps space. This could apply pressure on companies such as GitLab (NASDAQ:GTLB) and JFrog (NASDAQ:FROG),