While technology giants are burning cash to establish their supremacy over artificial intelligence, 28-year-old Varun Mohan is capitalizing on it. He chose to be with Google for his next milestone in the hard-edged competition among Alphabet Inc., Facebook Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI. Global netizens are wondering why Alphabet Inc’s CEO Sundar Pichai and OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman betted billions of dollars on Indian American Varun Mohan, who turned down OpenAI’s whopping $3bn offer for less – a $2.4 billion deal from Google.
Varun Mohan’s deal with Google catapulted him and his partner Douglas Chen on the threshold of the elite club of Indian American billionaires. Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Raj Sardana, and Nikesh Arora are the new members of this club, according to Forbes’ 2025 list of richest immigrants.
Who is Indian American Varun Mohan?
Varun Mohan is CEO and co-founder of Windsurf, an AI coding startup. Born to Indian immigrant parents in Sunnyvale, California, he was raised in a household shaped by Indian values and driven by American Dream. From a young age, Varun was drawn to technology and problem-solving. At The Harker School in San Jose, he stood out for his exceptional talent in math and computing, which earned him the moniker – a math prodigy. As an Olympiad achiever in math and computing, he developed a deeply analytical bent of mind that laid the foundation for his success as a tech entrepreneur in America.
Varun Mohan’s educational qualifications include both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from MIT University in Massachusetts. He earned a dual degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a tough combination that few meritorious students choose to pursue. At MIT, Mohan specialized in operating systems, distributed computing, machine learning, performance engineering, and algorithms.
Varun Mohan’s Career Journey from an Intern to CEO
Before launching the coding startup Windsurf, Varun Mohan built a strong professional foundation by working with some of the most respected tech companies in the world. During his time at MIT, he interned at Quora, LinkedIn, Samsung, Cloudian, and Databricks, gaining hands-on experience in machine learning systems, cloud storage, and data infrastructure. After graduation, he joined the self-driving car startup Nuro, where he rose to the rank of Lead Software Engineer.
In 2021, Varun co-founded Windsurf with Douglas Chen, his batchmate at MIT. As the CEO of Windsurf, he introduced Cascade, an AI-native development environment where engineers could write, test, and refactor code simply by speaking to their systems. Within months, over a million developers adopted it. The company raised around $240 million in funding and reached a valuation of $1.25 billion, making it one of the fastest-growing AI startups in the US Silicon Valley. A few months ago, Forbes named Windsurf as one of the top 50 AI companies in the world.
Why Varun Mohan Rejected OpenAI’s $3bn Offer for Google
It is said that the AI technology that Varun Mohan and his team at Windsurf built triggered Google DeepMind vs OpenAI. Varun was close to signing OpenAI’s $3-billion offer for Windsurf, but things fell apart when Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest investor, raised concerns over potential conflicts with its own product, GitHub Copilot. The disagreement stopped the deal halfway. Instead, he chose Google where he won’t lose his ownership as CEO of Windsurf. Precisely, Windsurf continues to run as an independent company and sell its technology to other clients.
Is 17-year-old Pranjali Awasthi the next Varun Mohan? She is the founder and CEO of Delv.AI, a disruptive startup for the online search landscape dominated by Google.
The $2.4 billion deal with Google DeepMind is not a full acquisition of Windsurf by Alphabet. Rather, it is a licensing and talent deal that gives Google non-exclusive rights to key Windsurf technologies without taking ownership of the company. Under the deal, he, along with his business partner and selected talents from the R&D team have joined Google DeepMind, Alphabet Inc.’s dedicated AI research division, to advance agentic coding projects and integrate their tools into Gemini.
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