Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen met in middle school in Sunnyvale, California, studied CS together at MIT, and in June 2021 founded Exafunction — a GPU optimization and virtualization platform. The product was profitable. Then they saw generative AI coming and made a counterintuitive decision: kill the profitable business and pivot.

The Double Pivot

In 2022, they renamed to Codeium and launched an AI coding autocomplete extension. It was good, but it was playing in a crowded field with GitHub Copilot. The free extension accumulated millions of individual users, but revenue was modest — around $12M ARR by late 2024. They needed a bigger bet.

The Agentic IDE

On November 13, 2024, they launched the Windsurf Editor — positioning it as the "first agentic IDE" with their proprietary Cascade technology for multi-step AI reasoning and Flow for real-time codebase awareness. Within 4 months, 1 million developers were using it. Revenue grew 8x: from $12M to $100M ARR between late 2024 and April 2025.

The Exit

In April 2025, they rebranded from Codeium to Windsurf. OpenAI reportedly offered $3B to acquire them. Ultimately, Google paid $2.4B for a non-exclusive technology license and key talent — Varun and Douglas joined Google DeepMind in July 2025 with 350+ enterprise clients including JPMorgan Chase and Dell.

• Founded: June 2021 (as Exafunction)
• Pivots: 2 (GPU infra → autocomplete → full IDE)
• $12M ARR: Late 2024
• $100M ARR: April 2025 (8x in 4 months)
• Google deal: $2.4B (July 2025)
• Enterprise clients: 350+ (JPMorgan, Dell)