Windsurf: The Enterprise AI IDE - with Varun and Anshul of Codeium AI

**Alessio** (0:04)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swigs, founder of Small AI.

**Swigs** (0:12)
Hey, and today we are delighted to be, I think the first podcast in the new Codeium Office. So thanks for having us and welcome, Varun and Anshul.

**Anshul Ramachandran** (0:21)
Thanks for having us.

**Varun Mohan** (0:22)
Yeah, thanks for having us.

**Swigs** (0:24)
This is the Silicon Valley office?

**Varun Mohan** (0:25)
Yeah.

**Swigs** (0:26)
So like, what's the story behind this?

**Varun Mohan** (0:27)
The story is that the office was previously, so we used to be on Castro Street, so this is in Mountain View. And I think a lot of the people at the company previously, were in SF or still in SF. And actually one thing if you notice about the company is it's actually like a two minute walk from the Caltrain. And I think we were, we didn't want to move the office like very far away from the Caltrain that would probably piss off a lot of the people that lived in San Francisco, this guy included. So we were like scouting a lot of spaces in the nearby area and this area popped up. It previously was being leased by I think Facebook slash WhatsApp and then immediately after that, Ghost Autonomy and then now here we are. And we also, I guess one of the things that the landlord told us was this was the place that they shot all the scenes for Silicon Valley at least like externally and stuff like that. So that just became a meme. Trust me, that wasn't like the main reason why we picked it but we've leaned into it.

**Swigs** (1:21)
It doesn't hurt. And obviously, that played a little bit into your launch with Windsurf as well. So let's get caught up. You were guest number four.

**Anshul Ramachandran** (1:30)
I think it was two.

**Varun Mohan** (1:31)
Maybe it was two.

**Swigs** (1:32)
Two. Might have been two. So a lot has happened since then. You've raised a huge round and also just launched your idea.
What's been the progress over the last year or so since the InSpace people last saw you?

**Varun Mohan** (1:44)
Yeah. So I think the biggest things that have happened are Codeium's extensions have continued to gain a lot of sort of popularity. We have over 800,000 sort of developers that use that product. Lots of large enterprises also use the product. We were recently awarded JP Morgan Chase's Hall of Innovation Award, which is usually not something a company gets within a year of deploying an enterprise product. And then large companies like Dell and stuff use the product. So I think we've seen a lot of traction on the enterprise space. But I think one of the most exciting things we've launched recently is this actually IDE called Windsurf. And I think for us one of the things that we've always thought about is how do we build the most powerful AI system for developers everywhere? The reason why we started out with the extension system was we felt that there were lots of developers that were not going to be on one platform. And that still is true, by the way. Outside of Silicon Valley, a lot of people don't use GitHub. This is like a very surprising finding. But most people use GitLab, Bitbucket, Garrett, Perverse, CVS, Harvest, Mercurial. I could keep going down a list, but there's probably 10 of them.
GitHub might have less than 10 percent penetration of the Fortune 500, full penetration. It's very small. And then also on top of that, GitHub has very high switching costs or source code management tools, right? Because you actually need to switch over all the dependent systems on this workflow software. It's much harder than even switching off of a database. So because of that, we actually found ways in which we could be better partners to our customers regardless of where they started their source code. And then more specifically on the IDE category, a lot of developers, surprise, surprise, don't just write TypeScript and Python, right? They write Java, they write Golang, they write a lot of different languages, and then a high quality language servers and debuggers matter. Very honestly, the JetBrains has the best debugger for Java. It's not even close, right? These are extremely complex pieces of software. We have customers where over 70 percent of their developers use JetBrains. And because of that, we wanted to provide a great experience wherever the developer was. But one thing that we found was lacking was, we were running into the limitations of building within the VS Code ecosystem on the VS Code platform. And I think we felt that there was an opportunity for us to build a premier sort of experience, and that was within the reach of the team. The team has done all the work, all the infrastructure work, to build the best possible experience and plug it into every IDE. Why don't we just build our own IDE that is by far the best experience? And as these agentic products start to become more and more possible, and all the research we've done on retrieval and just reasoning about code bases became more and more to life, we were like, hey, if we launch this agentic product on top of a system that we didn't have a lot of control over, it's just going to limit the value of the product, and we're just not going to be able to do the best tool. That's why we were super excited to launch Windsurf. I do think it is the most powerful IDE system out there right now in the capability, right? And this is just the beginning. I think we suspect that there's much, much more we can do, more than just the autocomplete sort of side, right? When we originally talked, probably autocomplete was the only piece of functionality the product actually had. And we've come a long way since then, right? These systems can now reason about large code bases without you adding everything, right? Like when you use Google, do you say like at New York Times post, blah, blah, blah, and like ask it a question? No. We want it to be a magical experience where you don't need to do that. We want it to actually go out and execute code. We think code execution is a really, really important piece. And when you write software, you not only just kind of come up with an idea, the way software kind of gets created is, software is originally this amorphous blob. And as time goes on and you have an idea, the blob and the cloud sort of disappear and you see this mountain. And we want it to be the case that as soon as you see the mountain, the AI helps you get to the mountain, and as soon as you see the mountain, the AI just creates the mountain for you. And that's why we don't believe in this sort of modality where you just write a task and it just goes out and does it. It's good for zero to one apps and I think people have been seeing Windsurf is capable of doing that and I'll let Anshul talk about that a little bit. But we've been seeing real value in real software development, which is more to say, this is not to say that current tools can't, but I think more in the process of actually evolving code from a very basic idea. Code is not really built as you have a PRD and then you get some output out. It's more like you have a general vision and yes, and as you write the code, you get more and more clarity on approaches that don't work and do work. You're killing ideas and creating ideas constantly and we think Windsurf is the right paradigm for that.