Windsurf: Transforming how software is built

In the rapidly evolving AI landscape, we believe the winning companies will be the ones who move fastest, think deeply, and build the best teams. Windsurf has done all three, and their products are widely beloved by users.

The path to building history-making companies is rarely straightforward, and Windsurf’s journey is full of twists and turns. When founders Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen started out in 2021, they created a GPU virtualization software company called Exafunction. Despite early, impressive customer traction, the Exafunction team quickly realized the potential of generative models, and directly following their Series A, they decided to use their own infrastructure to build a full-stack AI-powered coding platform, naming it Codeium.

Leigh Marie originally met Varun and Douglas at MIT and bonded over being former competitive mathletes, so it was only natural that this would be her first investment when she came to Kleiner Perkins. When we led the Series B in late 2023, many developers hadn’t started using AI-powered productivity tools. Momentum quickly grew over the past year, and as AI capabilities rapidly evolved, the team recognized that operating solely as an IDE extension was beginning to limit the product’s potential. They made the bold decision to pivot once again, this time expanding their vision to create an agentic IDE that they named Windsurf.

Windsurf has dramatically sped up even the largest enterprise development teams. They’ve earned the trust of companies like JP Morgan, Dell, Anduril, and many others by focusing relentlessly on security, extensibility, and usability — standing apart from everything else in the market.

In five short months after the pivot, Windsurf has redefined the 10x developer. Their user base now extends beyond developers to include product managers building prototypes, artists creating side projects, and salespeople building their own tools instead of renewing SaaS subscriptions. Anyone can build applications, without any technical background, for work or for fun.

We are honored to be part of the Windsurf journey, and can’t wait to see what they accomplish next.

— Leigh Marie & Mamoon