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OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

bloomberg.com

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Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#501

Post by pqtyw »

mvkel wrote: post #427
bufferoverflow wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But OpenAI already knows every single prompt sent to its models. They don't need to buy Windsurf for that.

That's a bit like saying having access to Google is as good as being Google. All they really see as a model provider is little fragments of the picture, like trying to reconstruct the Mona Lisa by knowing which paint swatches Leonardo used. In other words, they only saw whatever Windsurf sent as context with a "fix the bugs" prompt stapled to it. By owning Windsurf, they see the entire source code of what's being bui…

So just put up together a comparable VS Code based AI IDE in a couple of months and bundle it together with the ChatGPT subscription? They'd get loads of users very fast..

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#502

Post by pqtyw »

froh wrote: post #464
bko wrote: post #29

Incredible timeline to a $3B exit > Windsurf began in 2021 as Exafunction, founded by MIT graduates Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen. The company initially focused on GPU optimization before pivoting to AI-assisted coding tools, launching Codeium, which later evolved into Windsurf. > Series B (January 2024): $65 million at a $500 million valuation. > Series C (September 2024): $150 million, led by General Catalyst, at a…

The value is the team and their thinking and the customer base.

How is it different to a bunch of other apps which and tools which offer more or less exactly the same?

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#503

Post by pqtyw »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #384
dist-epoch wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder how much of the value is really from the model > The other stuff could be more or less a VS Code plugin The other stuff would take a team 6 months to implement. This is where the valuation comes from. Time to market, they are there TODAY.

As usual, HN misses the point. The customer list was probably worth about $2.99 billion, and the engineering work about $10 million.

> customer list

How many customers do they have? At $30 per month it would take forever to pay off even with a lot of growth.

Open AI could release an equivalent VS Code clone and make it entirely free and it would still be a lot cheaper than $3 billion.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#504

Post by fooster »

twobitshifter wrote: post #339
cheema33 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By the time my free trial ran out, VSCode had added a LLM chat interface in the sidebar. I am guessing you are talking about GitHub Copilot when you say VSCode. GitHub Copilot is far far inferior product when compared to Cursor, Windsurf or Augment Code. Most people who try almost any Copilot alternative for a reasonable amount of time end up canceling their Copilot subscription. I did, after two months of using bo…

there is now an integrated agent mode in vscode as of 3 weeks ago https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dutyOc_cAEU&pp=ygURYWdlbnQgbW9...

I’ve used both extensively. Copilot agent just is not as good as cursor with Gemini 2.5. It is much much slower among other things.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#505

Post by hadesarchitect »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #352
boleary-gl wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our plan is to be a superset of Cline and Roo's features (we already have all the major features from both) [0] We also have our own provider, which means no need to bring your own API keys (you can if you like, but it is batteries included by default) and we're not charging anything on top of the API pricing. Instead of monetizing on individual developers, we want it to be free for them and make money eventually off…

maybe you could answer a question about kilo usage: If I choose Google Gemini as the API provider and give it my Gemini API key, why does it say that I'm low on credits (and I get API request failures immediately)? As far as I understand gemini 2.5 pro preview is free to use. (and in Cline I'm able to choose Google Gemini as the API provider & provide my API key and it will successfully make API requests)

It looks like a bug to me. Did you report it on GitHub?

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#506

Post by thomashop »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #403
bfeynman wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

talented and smart folks for sure but can't not notice how much luck it is especially because its like 100% just better models. Windsurf raised a ton of money and then said they pivoted which they had millions raised to just do something completely different that likely wouldn't have been easier to raise for. Even in an interview with the cursor founder he kind of dumbly rambles that they launched and then basically…

Training data is almost certainly their main reason for this acquisition. Users themselves and the models they use don't really matter. What matters is their interactions with the models. Especially if you're trying to build coding agents that will be marketed to companies for $10k a month. OpenAI is going for the industry B2B opportunity here, not consumers or end users.

But aren't they getting this data already at a much larger scale? GPT is still one of the backbones in many coding assistants, even Windsurf.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#507

Post by meerita »

bko wrote: post #29

Incredible timeline to a $3B exit > Windsurf began in 2021 as Exafunction, founded by MIT graduates Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen. The company initially focused on GPU optimization before pivoting to AI-assisted coding tools, launching Codeium, which later evolved into Windsurf. > Series B (January 2024): $65 million at a $500 million valuation. > Series C (September 2024): $150 million, led by General Catalyst, at a…

Visual Studio Code Agent Mode uses whatever model you tell it to use.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#509

Post by gitfan86 »

blackoil wrote: post #473
retornam wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$400M in real revenue versus $300M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) are totally different things. Real revenue is money actually earned, while ARR just multiplies one month's subscription revenue ($25M) by 12, ignoring customer churn. Startups love flashing ARR figures because "$300M ARR" sounds impressive, but without knowing churn rates, they might never actually collect that full amount. JetBrains however collect…

Unless you have reason to believe the revenue is declining in recent months or will decline in near future, ARR is a better metric. last year real revenue made sense only for low growth companies.

The entire reason OpenAI has a high valuation is the expectation that AI will get a lot better in the next few years. If that happens, building a clone of Cursor/windsurf should be trivial. The only reason you would buy windsurf today is to either pump up the bubble OR use it to increase your market share of developers by taking users away from claude

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#510

Post by sanxiyn »

pqtyw wrote: post #501
mvkel wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit like saying having access to Google is as good as being Google. All they really see as a model provider is little fragments of the picture, like trying to reconstruct the Mona Lisa by knowing which paint swatches Leonardo used. In other words, they only saw whatever Windsurf sent as context with a "fix the bugs" prompt stapled to it. By owning Windsurf, they see the entire source code of what's being bui…

So just put up together a comparable VS Code based AI IDE in a couple of months and bundle it together with the ChatGPT subscription? They'd get loads of users very fast..

I think it is exactly this. There is no doubt whatsoever OpenAI can do this, but they decided not to. The reason, I think, is that they don't want to be a couple of months late. In other words, they spent $3B to save a couple of months.
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