Codeium and Windsurf: From Code Autocomplete to Devin Desktop

Codeium and Windsurf are two names for the same company and its products at different moments. Codeium began as a free AI code-completion tool, the kind of assistant that predicts the next lines of code as a developer types. Windsurf was first the name of its own code editor, launched in November 2024, and from April 2025 the name of the company itself. Since July 2025 the products have belonged to Cognition, the maker of the Devin coding agent, and on June 2, 2026 the Windsurf Editor was renamed Devin Desktop. Anyone reading older tutorials, pricing pages or reviews needs this timeline, because the same product appears under three names.

The company started in 2021 as Exafunction, founded by Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen, childhood friends and MIT graduates. According to TechCrunch, Exafunction worked on GPU optimization and virtualization for AI workloads, meaning software that helps many AI jobs share expensive graphics processors efficiently. In 2022 it pivoted to generative AI for code and took the name Codeium. That background in squeezing more work out of GPUs mattered, because a code-completion product has to answer in a fraction of a second on every pause in typing, which makes serving cost a central business problem.

Codeium's first product was an extension for existing editors. It sent the code around the cursor, plus relevant snippets retrieved from the rest of the project, to the company's own completion model and showed the suggestion inline. By August 2024 TechCrunch reported more than 700,000 users, over 1,000 enterprise customers including Anduril, Zillow and Dell, support for around 70 programming languages, and integrations with editors such as Visual Studio and JetBrains IDEs. The same report described a $150 million Series C led by General Catalyst at a $1.25 billion valuation, and enterprise options to self-host or run a hybrid setup. Codeium said it trained its models on public code, filtered out code under non-permissive licenses, and did not train its proprietary autocomplete model on user data.

On November 13, 2024, Codeium launched the Windsurf Editor, a fork of Visual Studio Code. A fork is a copy of an open-source project that is then developed separately; forking let Codeium change the editor's interface directly rather than working only through the plugin system. The central feature was Cascade, an agent in the chat panel. An agent, in this sense, is a language model that can take actions with tools rather than only reply with text. Cascade could search the codebase, edit files, run terminal commands and track what the developer had just done, so it could continue a task where the person left off. At launch, Maginative reported, all Cascade features were free with no waitlist. On April 4, 2025 the company renamed itself Windsurf, saying most users already knew it by that name, and its editor extensions became Windsurf Plugins.

The ownership story moved fast in 2025. Bloomberg reported in May that OpenAI had agreed to buy Windsurf for about $3 billion, and on July 11 reported that the deal had fallen through, in part because Microsoft, through its relationship with OpenAI, would have gained access to Windsurf's intellectual property, according to a summary in DeepLearning.AI's The Batch. The same day Google paid $2.4 billion for a non-exclusive license to Windsurf's technology and hired Mohan, Chen and some engineers. Three days later, on July 14, 2025, Cognition announced a definitive agreement to acquire what remained: the intellectual property, product, trademark, brand and team. Cognition's announcement cited $82 million in annual recurring revenue, more than 350 enterprise customers and hundreds of thousands of daily active users, and said every Windsurf employee would share in the deal with vesting accelerated.

On June 2, 2026 Cognition shipped Devin Desktop as an over-the-air update to Windsurf. The company describes it as a full IDE with an agent manager built in, backwards-compatible with Windsurf and Visual Studio Code extensions, keybindings and settings, with plans and pricing unchanged. Its default view is the Agent Command Center, a Kanban board for local and cloud agents. Devin Local, a Rust rewrite with Cascade's capabilities, became the primary local agent; Cognition says it is up to 30% more token-efficient and can launch subagents. Through the Agent Client Protocol, an open protocol, the editor can also host outside agents such as Codex, Claude Agent and OpenCode.

Compared with alternatives, Codeium competed first with GitHub Copilot on inline completion, then with Cursor and other AI-first editors on agentic coding. Its distinguishing choices were a generous free tier, its own completion models, enterprise self-hosting, and an early bet on an agent that could act across many files. After the acquisition, the product's direction is tied to Devin, Cognition's cloud agent, so the editor increasingly acts as a control panel for several agents rather than one assistant.

The limitations are the same as for any coding agent. Agents can make plausible but wrong edits, touch more files than intended, or run commands with side effects, so diffs and test results need human review. Cascade's documentation notes that each prompt consumes credits and that one prompt may make up to 40 tool calls before asking to continue, which can make cost hard to predict on large tasks. Frequent renames also mean many guides and screenshots online are out of date. For teams, the practical requirements are an account and plan, a decision on cloud versus self-hosted deployment, and a review process for agent changes.