Who is Varun Mohan? The Indian-origin CEO who rejected $3 Billion OpenAI deal for Google DeepMind

Varun Mohan/Linkedin

In the high-stakes world of artificial intelligence, it's not every day someone turns down a $3 billion deal. But that’s exactly what Varun Mohan, the Indian-origin CEO of AI startup Windsurf, just did. Instead of selling his company to OpenAI, Mohan has chosen a different path of joining Google DeepMind.

Mohan, along with his longtime friend and co-founder Douglas Chen, and several top researchers from Windsurf, will now be working at Google. In what’s being described as a “reverse-acquihire,” Google is not buying Windsurf, nor taking any stake in the company. But it is paying a hefty $2.4 billion to license Windsurf’s technology and bring key talent on board.

It’s a bold move and it has everyone asking: Who exactly is Varun Mohan?

Raised in Sunnyvale, California, Mohan is the son of Indian immigrants. As a student at the Harker School in San Jose, he stood out early for his talent in math and computing Olympiads. He went on to earn both undergraduate and graduate degrees from MIT, focusing on everything from operating systems to distributed computing and machine learning.

Before founding Windsurf, Mohan built a solid career across some of tech’s biggest names, including Nuro, Quora, LinkedIn, Databricks, and Samsung. In 2021, he teamed up with Chen to launch a company called Codeium, which later rebranded as Windsurf. What started as a project around GPU virtualization evolved into a full-blown AI coding platform.

Under Mohan’s leadership, Windsurf grew fast—over a million developers signed on in just four months, and the company raised $243 million, soaring to a $1.25 billion valuation. Mohan is widely credited for championing the “agentic IDE” concept, a system that combines large language models with automated coding workflows. He’s long believed AI will handle most of the coding grunt work in the future, letting engineers focus on creative problem-solving.

Now, as he takes his vision to Google DeepMind, the future of Windsurf remains uncertain. Jeff Wang, the company’s head of business, has stepped in as interim CEO, while the remaining 250 employees carry on.

One thing’s for sure: with this move, Google has gained a powerful mind and Varun Mohan’s next chapter could be one that shapes the future of AI development itself.