Windsurf is an enterprise company

Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan recently appeared on the Lenny podcast. Highly recommend listening – but one section stood out in particular.

Lenny asked Varun what distinguishes Windsurf from other code generation companies such as Cursor and Lovable. Varun said:

On the product side, I think we've invested a lot in making sure codebase understanding for very large codebases is really high quality. That's because of where we started. We worked with some of the world's largest companies like Dell and JPMorgan Chase. Companies like Dell have singular codebases that over a hundred million lines of code. Being able to understand that really quickly to make large-scale changes is something that we spent a lot of time doing. That requires us to build our own models that can consume large chunks of their codebase in parallel across thousands of GPUs and almost rank them to find out what the most important snippets of code are for any question that's asked about the codebase. We've gone out and built out large distributed systems based on our infrastructure background to do that. That's one....

The second key piece is we're not only tied to Windsurf.... We're pretty focused on supporting IDEs like JetBrains. JetBrains has over 70-80% of Java developers. The reason we don't feel as big a need to almost build a competing product to JetBrains is JetBrains is a very extensible product in a way that VSCode is not. VSCode is not very extensible. For us, our goal here is not just to satisfy a subset of users who can switch to our IDE, but we want to give this agentic experience to every sort of developer out there. If that means there are Java developers who write in JetBrains, that's fine. We work with a lot of large enterprises who have 10,000+ developers where over 50% of those developers are on JetBrains. It's a very large product....

Another key piece for enterprises is that we work in a lot of very secure environments. We have FedRAMP for certain clients, which means we can sell to very large government entities. We have a hybrid mode of using the product which means that all the code that is indexed actually lives on the tenant of the user. Code is one of the most important pieces of IP for these companies.

So if you were to look at it from a big company perspective, there are many reasons why over the years of just building an enterprise product, we've handled a lot of complexities that large companies want to see.

This was news to me because I've seen Cursor and Windsurf discussed more or less interchangeably. And it's impressive that Windsurf has gotten so much consumer word of mouth, when it's really an enterprise company.

In another part of the conversation, Varun talks about how they built out a go-to-market team (GTM) early. In fact, as a company of 150 people, most of their employees (80) are in sales.

So yeah Windsurf is an enterprise company, which is probably good for their revenue retention. Glean appears to be pursuing a similar market position.