codeium
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Douglas Chen and the Art of Changing the Tool
He and a middle-school friend built a GPU company, turned it into an AI coding assistant, then made the editor itself their product. In 2025, the next turn took Douglas Chen to Google DeepMind.
Varun Mohan Kept Rewriting the Plan
He turned a profitable GPU business into Codeium, then gave the coding assistant its own editor. After Windsurf’s abrupt 2025 split, Mohan took the same question to Google DeepMind: how much of building software can an agent actually do?
Windsurf
Windsurf (formerly Codeium, originally Exafunction) is a Mountain View-based AI coding company that built one of the first agentic AI-native IDEs, powered by its Cascade agent. Founded in 2021 by MIT classmates Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen, it grew to over 1 million developers and $82M ARR before a dramatic July 2025 split: Google paid roughly $2.4B to hire its founders and license its technology, while Cognition (maker of Devin) acquired the remaining product, brand, team, and customer base. In June 2026, Cognition relaunched the Windsurf IDE as Devin Desktop, an agent command center for managing local and cloud coding agents.