Benton Bagot

Windsurf | Partnerships | Sales | Business Dev | Finance | Consulting

[Cognition @cognition]

AI should earn its keep. Introducing the AI Productivity Guarantee.

If Devin delivers less engineering value than you’re paying for, Cognition will fund your usage until it does, up to $10 million.

It’s time for the AI industry to stop maximizing tokens and start maximizing productive output.

[Cognition @cognition]

Introducing Devin Desktop.

Manage fleets of local and cloud agents from one surface. Plan, delegate, review, and ship without leaving your editor.

[Cognition @cognition]

The terminal hasn’t changed much since the 1970s. What you do with it has.

Introducing Devin for Terminal: everything we learned building Devin, now as a local agent, available right in your shell.

And when your work outgrows your laptop, hand it off to the cloud.

[Benton Bagot @bentonbagot]

@cognition Same same but BETTER!!!

[Benton Bagot @bentonbagot]

@stoolpresidente 🤘

[Cognition @cognition]

We’ve raised over $400M at a $10.2B post-money valuation to advance the frontier of AI coding agents.

The round was led by Founders Fund with other existing investors including Lux, 8VC, Neo, Elad Gil, Definition Capital, and Swish VC all doubling down. We’re also joined by new investors including Bain Capital Ventures and D1 Capital.

Two of our early investors, Christian Lawless of Conversion Capital and Emily Cohen of Neo, have even joined our team full-time.

[Benton Bagot @bentonbagot]

The market and our partners are seeing the value and this is just the beginning. Very excited for the future!

[Cognition @cognition]

We’ve raised over $400M at a $10.2B post-money valuation to advance the frontier of AI coding agents.

The round was led by Founders Fund with other existing investors including Lux, 8VC, Neo, Elad Gil, Definition Capital, and Swish VC all doubling down. We’re also joined by new investors including Bain Capital Ventures and D1 Capital.

Two of our early investors, Christian Lawless of Conversion Capital and Emily Cohen of Neo, have even joined our team full-time.

[Devin Desktop @devindesktop]

Wave 12 is here, and it’s a big one!

📚 DeepWiki-powered docs for every symbol in your codebase
🔍 Vibe and Replace
🐛 100+ bugs squashed
🎨 Brand new UI
… and more!

Everything that’s new 🧵

[Jeff Wang @jeffwang]

To put it mildly, the past week at Windsurf has been crazy. There have been a lot of different rumors and reports, so I want to share a transparent account of how it actually went down.

Before I start, I just want to say that Varun and Douglas were great founders and this company meant a lot to them, and it should be acknowledged that this whole situation must have been difficult for them as well.

One week ago, last Friday, I walked into the office for our all-hands, where our ~250 people were expecting to hear that we were getting acquired by OpenAI. By that time, I had already learned what was really about to happen and had broken the news to Graham, the new President, and Kevin, the new CTO. You can imagine the shock when the team found out.

It was my job to explain to the company our path forward as a company. In my view, there were a few options: try to raise more money (VCs were offering), try to sell the company (we had interest from multiple parties), try to distribute (although there were liabilities to wind down), or try to keep running the company. Although we had lost some great people and taken a serious blow to morale, we still had all of our IP, product, and strong talent including an excellent GTM machine - the core components of the company were still there.

The mood was very bleak. Some people were upset about financial outcomes or colleagues leaving, while others were worried about the future. A few were in tears, and the Q&A had been understandably hostile. In distress, people asked if we could distribute the cash immediately, but we also needed it to pay bills and keep the product working for customers.

After trying to steady the team as much as we could, Graham and I spent the rest of the evening on calls, trying to identify every available option.

Out of the blue, we got a text and email, from Scott and Russell, with the message, “Chat?” It was around 5:30pm, exactly this time last week.

I immediately called Graham and told him I thought this combination made sense. Cognition had been the one team our people had respected the most. While they had overinvested in engineering, they had frankly underinvested in GTM and Marketing, and our teams in those functions are nothing short of world class. On the other hand, we now were missing a Core Engineering team, and there’s no better group of AI engineers than the lineup Cognition has assembled.

Then, there was the product logic. Devin would benefit from a foreground synchronous agent, while we needed a remote asynchronous agent. The teams and products together would be able to create an unrivaled end to end platform.

We took the Cognition approach very seriously from the start and launched right into negotiations. Scott and his team moved fast, and while the timeline was exploding with memes and commentary between Friday and Monday, Scott and Russell spent that time in our office, working tirelessly to get a deal done in record time. Saturday rolled in, and I brought Kevin to the office. At this point, we were still having 1:1s with our enterprise engineers to retain them, and at the same time, we were trying to get more information to diligence Cognition while reviewing other potential partners.

Saturday, I was still getting inbound interest from potential acquirers, including one we had all looked up to for a long time. But by then, Scott was already in our conference room with physical papers to sign and was handing me a pen. We had already made up our minds that there was no better partner than Cognition, even with other excellent and impressive companies interested. We quickly brought in lawyers to review the LOI and signed that day, a little over 24 hours after Scott’s cold outreach.

Saturday had been spent understanding each other’s businesses, and when the sun came up Sunday morning while we were in the office, we prepared to move on to getting the deal finalized. The Windsurf team had been through too many twists and turns, so both Scott and I felt that the next transition for them had to truly be final.

The other priority during this process, which Scott and I aligned on and was one of the things that helped me realize he was the right partner, was that we needed to take care of all Windsurf employees. Their work and talent had gotten us to this point; they deserved to be paid for that, and we wanted to give them a better price than any of the previous scenarios. That resulted in a key part of the deal: structuring it to give a payout to every employee, to waive all cliffs, and to accelerate all vesting for Windsurf equity.

On Sunday, an army of lawyers from both sides descended on the office, having been challenged by Scott and Russell to get this deal finalized within 24 hours. We ate and slept (or at least tried to grab quick naps between discussions) in the office through the weekend to get it done. Our teams and lawyers stayed up all night Sunday working out the final details. On Monday morning, we went over every detail again, got board approvals, and the documents were ready to sign. One of our lawyers said it was one of the fastest deals they’d seen.

Monday 9:30am, we signed our definitive agreement for Cognition to acquire Windsurf. Scott had given a heads up to Cognition employees, and we had another all-hands scheduled for Windsurf employees at 10am that morning. After the traumatic announcement on Friday, Scott and Russell wanted us to be able to open Monday with good news and we wanted to handle this new announcement in a much better way for employees. In fact Russell took a red eye the night before and somehow made it to the Austin office just in time.

We held Monday’s all-hands in the same room as Friday’s, and this time Scott was by my side at the front of the room. It was a blur, but the highlights I’ll always remember were getting to tell employees what we had negotiated for them (“We’ve decided to give you 1 year of vest, OH, and years 2, 3, and 4 as well!”) and Scott saying, “A founder goes down with the ship.” The applause from our people seemed to last forever, and I was on the verge of tears myself.

Now comes the real work. We are officially one company, operating as two entities, but with much to do both internally and externally. We have work to do on both our team and on our product, to realize our shared ambitions. It was a wild ride this week, and now the story has been told. We are excited to move on to the next chapter. We’re putting our heads back down to focus on building the future of AI together.

[Devin Desktop @devindesktop]

The show goes on!

Announcing the real next chapter of Windsurf - we’re joining forces with @cognition_labs , the creators of Devin, to reinvent AI coding.

Let’s surf.

[Cognition @cognition]

Cognition has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf.

The acquisition includes Windsurf’s IP, product, trademark and brand, and strong business. Above all, it includes Windsurf’s world-class people, whom we’re privileged to welcome to our team.

We are also honoring their talent and hard work in building Windsurf into the great business it is today. This transaction is structured so that 100% of Windsurf employees will participate financially. They will also have all vesting cliffs waived and will receive fully accelerated vesting for their work to date.

At Cognition we have focused on developing robust and secure autonomous agents, while Windsurf has pioneered the agentic IDE. Devin + Windsurf are a powerful combination for the developers we serve. Working side by side, we’ll soon enable you to plan tasks in an IDE powered by Devin’s codebase understanding, delegate chunks of work to multiple Devins in parallel, complete the highest-leverage parts yourself with the help of autocomplete, and stitch it all back together in the same IDE.

Cognition and Windsurf are united behind a shared vision for the future of software engineering, and there’s never been a better time to build. Welcome to our new colleagues from Windsurf!

[Benton Bagot @bentonbagot]

@Monks_TS @windsurfai Excited for the partnership! Love the Monks team leaning in with Windsurf.

[Benton Bagot @bentonbagot]

@FracSlap Use @windsurf_ai and you can supercharge your current devs

[Devin Desktop @devindesktop]

For the next seven days, get free unlimited GPT-4.1 on Windsurf, on us.

That’s right, free.

We are very excited about GPT-4.1 given our internal evals. We have rate limits to prevent abuse, so go build without worrying about credits.

[Devin Desktop @devindesktop]

Wave 7 is here!

We made Cascade available on JetBrains IDEs.

Now JetBrains developers have access to the multi-step agentic experience that Cascade provides.

Oh and btw, we're no longer going by Codeium... everything is Windsurf! 🏄

[Varun Mohan @_mohansolo]

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how Windsurf’s context retrieval is better than other products. One rebuttal I’ve seen is that all products “index your codebase”.

But indexing code ≠ context retrieval. It is necessary but not sufficient.

Thought I’d share a bit about what we’re doing under the hood to get the best results.

[Benton Bagot @bentonbagot]

@EvaLovesDesign Producers scared of Austin taking all the jobs with the new film incentives. Love a scared Hollywood. Obviously never been to Austin lol.

[Devin Desktop @devindesktop]

Announcing Windsurf Referrals

Get 500 flex credits when someone you refer signs up for Pro or Teams.

For more info, visit https://t.co/O5EEECsbOV

[Benton Bagot @bentonbagot]

@adamsilverman @AgentOpsAI @MadronaVentures Where is Codeium/Windsurf?

[Riley Brown @rileybrown]

Lets use Grok to create a Mario like video game, except we're going to design the characters WITH @grok

Without writing a single line of code!

We're going to use Grok to generate the code for the game and the images images for the:

1. main character
2. enemy characters
3. and the coins, we will make of course, DogeCoins

We're going to do this in 10 minutes using Grok and @windsurf_ai and we will deploy it on Vercel

(Deployment took 1 singular prompt)

00:00 Introduction to the Game Project and Windsurf
01:25 Generating and Running the Initial Game Code
02:18 Enhancing the Game with New Features
03:39 Adding Characters and Enemies w/ GROK
08:47 Deploying the Game On VERCEL