creators

Varun Mohan: Windsurf founder, Google DeepMind

Varun Mohan co-founded Codeium and Windsurf and is now director of software engineering at Google DeepMind, where he works on the Antigravity platform.

Varun Mohan is director of software engineering at Google DeepMind. Google gave him that title in its own I/O 2026 developer post in May 2026, where he presented Antigravity 2.0, the company's agent-first development platform; his X bio reads 'building @antigravity @GoogleDeepMind'. He studied at MIT and was a tech lead at the autonomous delivery company Nuro, running its autonomy infrastructure teams. In 2021 he and Douglas Chen founded Exafunction, which sold GPU virtualisation software, and in 2022 they pivoted it to the AI coding assistant Codeium. The company raised $150 million at a $1.25 billion valuation in August 2024, when it reported more than 700,000 users and over 1,000 enterprise customers, and renamed itself Windsurf on 4 April 2025. The company was then split in two. OpenAI's reported $3 billion acquisition lapsed when its exclusivity period expired, and on 11 July 2025 Google agreed to pay a reported $2.4 billion for a non-exclusive licence to Windsurf's technology and to hire Mohan, Chen and several senior researchers into Google DeepMind, taking no stake in the company; Jeff Wang, head of business, became interim chief executive of what remained. Three days later Cognition signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf, including its product, IP, brand and staff. He has worked on agentic coding at Google DeepMind since; in Google's own post he introduces himself with ‘I work on Antigravity’.

Specialization

AI coding agents, developer tools, agentic coding

Country

United States