The "Windsurf" brand has little value in comparison to OpenAI's, but $3B lets them hit the ground running with a proven developer product (better than Cursor IMHO), the team who created it, and a customer base.
Maybe ChatGPT told them it was a good idea? Considering the proliferation of these tools there's no way it's worth $3B. This functionality is going to be built into every IDE eventually: vscode just got an agent mode, it might not be great yet but it's only a matter of time until Windsurf is essentially just management tools because there won't be much editor value add available.
Precisely. For most users, there is hardly value in moving off of VSCode. Granted, if Windsurf can make itself into a VSCode extension, there may be some competitive value to it.
Not necessarily. When growth is the priority, companies tend to expand along the value chain once they've established a foothold. For OpenAI, an IDE is a natural extension in a market where they're competing with Microsoft. It would be surprising if Anthropic didn't do the same soon.
This week OpenAI released newer models, so it could now use a reassessment. They are: gpt-4.1 family, o3, o4-mini. Users are benefiting from the ongoing competition which hopefully will last all the way to self-improving AGI.
I do not regularly use either, but my impression is that Cursor's users have primarily been using Claude and are largely switching to Gemini, while Windsurf has a lot of existing enterprise contracts that wouldn't even notice an underlying model switch from the proprietary Codeium model to o3 mini or whatever.
This would make a lot of sense for both sides I think. Owning the part of the stack that decides where the inference requests go is like Google owning the browser.
Readit News
If you believe the founders/team is the right group to deliver a core product 3b is nothing to get them onside.
> Hey all this is speculation, probably stemming from earlier in the week when we had the joint livestream with OpenAI.
> There’s a ton of interest and attention on Windsurf rn which is awesome, but we are 100 percent focused on building amazing products.
> Not sure where this article came from, but we have some amazing updates next week that are gonna blow your socks off
https://old.reddit.com/r/windsurf/s/0CR07Qwkf9
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Anyway, it always makes sense to buy something much cheaper.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698819
That was in August 2024, before the vibe-coding meme hype, so $3B makes sense.