More details emerge on how Windsurf’s VCs and founders got paid from the Google deal

Weeks after the unveiling that Google Windsurf $ 2.4 billion has paid to permit its technology, while at the same time hires its CEO and top talent, the implications of the deal are still Some founders and starting employees rattle About Silicon Valley.

Google’s payment to the startup was effectively divided into two equal parts, according to two people who are familiar with the deal. The part of investors was $ 1.2 billion.

The other half was in the form of compensation packages for around 40 windsurf employees who were hired by the tech giant with a considerable part of that $ 1.2 billion that went to the co-founders of the startup, Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen, sources say.

The transaction was a good result for VCS, including Greenoaks, smaller Perkins and general catalyst. Windsurf raised a total of around $ 243 million from the last increase in 2024 that the company appreciated to $ 1.25 billion, which means that the total return on investors was around 4x their original financing.

Greenoaks, which led from Windsurf’s Seed and Series A finance and 20% of the company, owned around $ 500 million on their investment of $ 65 million in the startup, according to a person who is familiar with the business. Smaller Perkins, which led the Windsurf series B, returned about 3 times of invested capital, according to another person who was familiar with the deal.

Google, smaller Perkins and Greenoaks refused to comment. General catalyst, Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen did not respond to a request for comment.

Yet most investors sought a greater victory of the company.

In February, WAN reported that smaller Perkins was in discussion for a new financing round in Leiden, which made the startup, which was then known as Codeium, at $ 2.85 billion. That deal did not happen, according to a person who was familiar with the case, because Windsurf had agreed instead to be purchased by OpenAi for $ 3 billion.

As we all know now, the OpenAI acquisition unraveled and Google threw in with its deal instructed to offer investor’s returns and to achieve talent and IP without acquiring shares.

But what the valley rattles is: although the Google deal was good for the co-founders and VCs, it did not benefit a large part of the approximately 250 employees of Windsurf, especially after they expected a payment from the sale to OpenAI.

In a typical acquisition, employees would get money for the shares they owned and they would often have Their fortress schedule accelerated. However, Windsurf employees who have been hired in the past year did not receive a payment from the deal, these people said.

The Google deal was especially disturbing for around 200 windsurf employees who were not hired by the search giant.

Instead of transferring every penny of Google’s payment in their own pockets, investors chose to leave the company with more than $ 100 million in capital.

One source says that this was completely funded by VCS, which means that their total payment was around $ 1.1 billion. Another person, however, said that the founders went in equally to leave the company with a nestei from the Google payment.

Several people said the money for the company would have been sufficient to pay all remaining employee revenues in the valuation of the Google Deal per share, regardless of how long they had been at the company. However, in order to have done that immediately, however, would have been problematic, so that the company had less cash to operate and – with founders and important people away – without investors ready to finance a new increase. The remaining leadership should probably be closed after doing such cash distributions, one of the people said. In the meantime, another person claimed that the company had sufficient capital to pay employees and continue to operate.

That difference of opinion is only part of the reason that the deal became so controversial.

What more is, at least some of the employees, have, despite attractive wages and benefits, hired, withdrew their stock exchanges and restarted their fortress periods. That meant that they would have to wait another four years for their total payment in Google shares, according to people who are familiar with the deal.

Some top VCs condemned the co-founders of the 3-year-old startup for not sharing their windfall with all the people who helped build the company.

“Windsurf and others are really bad examples of founders who leave their teams and do not even share the proceeds with their team,” wrote Vinod Khosla on X. “I would certainly not work with their founders next time.”

After a few days of Limbo after the announcement of the Google deal, the remaining entity of Windsurf, led by Interim -CEO Jeff Wang, managed to sell itself to cognition.

Cognition acquired the IP and product from Windsurf and did not apply to all the staff that Google was not hired.

Although the exact deal conditions of that sale were not announced, the acquisition allowed every employee to win the sale financially, according to a Blog published by Cognition.

Two other sources that have an estimated tech crunt that Cognition paid $ 250 million to acquire the remaining entity of Windsurf.

Cognition did not respond to a request for comment.