Windsurf, formerly known as Codeium, is an AI developer tools company founded in 2021 by Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen, originally under the name Exafunction. The company first launched Codeium as a free AI code completion and chat assistant before rebranding around its flagship AI-native editor, Windsurf, and later adopting Windsurf as the overall company name.
The Windsurf Editor is an AI-first development environment whose signature capability is Cascade, an agentic system that can understand a codebase, plan multi-step changes, run actions, and iterate with the developer. The platform also offers in-IDE chat, autocomplete, and enterprise deployment options including self-hosted and on-premises configurations for organizations with strict security needs.
The company grew rapidly into the unicorn tier, raising large venture rounds and reporting fast adoption among individual developers and enterprises. Its history includes significant strategic interest from major AI companies, and key leadership has shifted amid acquisition discussions, while the Windsurf product and brand continued to operate.
Windsurf competes directly with Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and other AI coding assistants. Its differentiators include the Cascade agentic workflow, strong enterprise and self-hosting options, and a heritage of free, broadly available code assistance.
For developers and enterprises wanting an AI-native editor with strong agentic capabilities and flexible enterprise deployment, Windsurf is a leading choice, though the brand transition from Codeium and corporate changes have created some market uncertainty.