Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan throws cold water on 1-person, billion-dollar startup idea at VB Transform: ‘more people allow you to grow faster’

As AI-powered tools spread through enterprise software stacks, the rapid growth of the AI coding platform Windsurf is becoming a case study of what happens when developers adopt agentic tooling at scale.

In a session at today’s VB Transform 2025 conference, CEO and co-founder Varun Mohan discussed how Windsurf’s integrated development environment (IDE) surpassed one million developers within four months of launch. More notably, the platform now writes over half of the code committed by its user base.

The conversation, moderated by VentureBeat CEO Matt Marshall, opened with a brief but pointed disclaimer: Mohan could not comment on OpenAI’s widely reported potential acquisition of Windsurf.

The issue has drawn attention following a Wall Street Journal report detailing a brewing standoff between OpenAI and Microsoft over the terms of that deal and broader tensions within their multi-billion-dollar partnership. According to the WSJ, OpenAI seeks to acquire Windsurf without ...