From intern to ₹2,00,00,00,00,000: How a 28-yr-old techie who interned for 4 years triggered a Google-OpenAI war
From interning at five tech firms during college to building a billion-dollar AI startup, 28-year-old Varun Mohan's journey triggered a ₹20,400 crore deal with Google after he rejected OpenAI's ₹25,500 crore offer. His voice-based coding tool, Cascade, sparked a high-stakes rivalry between Google and OpenAI, making him one of the youngest and richest immigrant tech founders today.
Varun Mohan Windsurf A 28-year-old Indian-American techie, Varun Mohan, has signed a ₹20,400 crore ($2.4 billion) deal with Google DeepMind after rejecting OpenAI's ₹25,500 crore ($3 billion) offer. The deal sparked a fresh wave of rivalry between the two AI giants and has placed Mohan among the richest immigrant entrepreneurs in the US.Varun Mohan, born to Indian immigrants in Sunnyvale, California, interned at eight companies -- Quora, LinkedIn, Samsung, Cloudian, and Databricks -- while studying at MIT. These four years of hands-on experience in machine learning, cloud systems, and infrastructure helped him build a strong technical base before he entered the startup space.
After graduation, he joined the autonomous vehicle startup Nuro, where he rose to the position of Lead Software Engineer.In 2021, Varun Mohan co-founded Windsurf with his MIT batchmate Douglas Chen. Their company launched Cascade, an AI-native coding platform that allows developers to write and test code by simply speaking to the system.Cascade gained rapid adoption, with over a million developers using it within months. Windsurf raised $240 million and reached a valuation of $1.25 billion. It was later named among Forbes' top 50 AI companies globally.
Google and OpenAI were both interested in acquiring Varun Mohan's startup, Windsurf, because of its breakthrough product, Cascade—an AI-native coding environment that allows developers to write, test, and refactor code using natural language. The tool had gained rapid adoption among developers and posed a potential shift in how software is built, making it a strategic asset in the race for dominance in agentic coding and AI-assisted development.
OpenAI was close to acquiring Windsurf for $3 billion. However, its primary investor, Microsoft, raised concerns over possible overlaps with GitHub Copilot. As a result, the deal stalled midway.
Varun Mohan then accepted Google's $2.4 billion offer. The agreement is not an acquisition. It is a licensing and talent deal, which gives Google DeepMind non-exclusive rights to key Windsurf technologies. Windsurf continues to function as an independent company and can license its tools to other clients.Under the deal, Mohan, Chen, and a select group from Windsurf's R&D team have joined Google DeepMind to work on agentic coding projects and integrate their systems with Google's Gemini platform.Following the deal, Forbes added Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen to its 2025 list of richest immigrants. They join a group that includes Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Raj Sardana, and Nikesh Arora.
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