It is not uncommon for large companies to acquire startups, mainly for their talent instead of their product. Acquihires, as they are called, have large companies get talented employees, while they circumvent traditional recruitment methods.
However, since the AI Talent wars have been warmed up, large companies such as Meta, Google and Microsoft have been involved in Reverse Acquihires at AI-Startups. That is, they dive into to hire star talent and licensing technology, so that the rest is thrown away along the road. The technical giants get talent and they circumvent the need for the government’s approval and antitrust research that would happen if she bought the company downright.
The remaining employees are left to the chaff of their former company. Due to the count of Bloomberg there have been Six since last MarchAnd while the AI Talent Wars will continue, we will probably see more.
6. Google DeepMind and Windsurf
In July 2025, the DeepMind Division from Google Windsurf CEO hired Varun Mohan and co -founder Douglas ChenTogether with other important members of their R&D team. The $ 2.4 billion deal also included windsurf technology. Google did not take an interest or any controlling interest in the startup.
The deal came after Windsurf was almost sold to OpenAI in what would be a $ 3 billion deal. The Windsurf -employees who did not hire Google were expecting to be part of OpenAI as lagging behind a company without leaders.
In a surprising twist, Windsurf was quickly taken over by AI Coding Startup, Cognition. Yet the story does not have a happy ending. Shortly thereafter, Cognition fired 30 members of the Windsurf team and offered buyouts to the remaining 200 tech crunch reported.
5. Meta and scale AI
In June Meta completed a deal with data labeling company scale AI. Meta acquired a group from its top engineers, including founder Alexandr Wang, and took a 49% interest in the company, for a price tag of $ 15 billion. “As part of this we will deepen the work we do together, produce data for AI models and Alexandr Wang will become a member of Meta to work on our super intelligence efforts,” ” Meta spokesperson said.
A month later, the scale fired 14% of his workforce. Interim -CEO Jason Wore said The company plans to concentrate on its government and business companies in the future.
4. Google and character.ai
In August 2024, Google also concluded a deal with Chatbot Startup Character.ai, in which he hires the founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel de Freitas, as part of a $ 2.7 billion deal. “We are pleased to announce that we have concluded an agreement with Google with which we can speed up our progress,” Character.ai said In a statement at that time. The explanation also explained that the startup would grant a non -exclusive license to the technology giant for his LLM technology.
In the aftermath of the inverted Acquihire, Character.ai has switched to a cheaper business model. Instead of training LLMS, it easily develops AI signs. Interim CEO Dominic Perella told Bloomberg: “We remained positioned much better than some people,” pointing it for a reverse Acquihire character.ai is doing well.
3. Amazon and Covarian
In August 2024, Amazon Robotics company Covariant’s three founders (Peter Chen, Pieter Abbeel and Rocky Duan) hired, as well as about a quarter of the employees. They also received a non -exclusive license for Covarian’s Robotic Foundation models. By one whistleblowerAmazon paid $ 380 million, which is much higher than $ 119.5 million, that is when deals have to be reported to the FTC.
The Washington Post It reported that according to the submission of the whistleblowers, the current CEO of Covarian, Ted Stinson, said that if Amazon would have bought the company downright, the deal would have been killed by antitrust authorities. According to the whistleblowers, the deal limits which licenses can sell covarian without paying a fee to Amazon, which means that his ability to grow. The submission of the whistleblowers said that Covarian would only last a year after the deal had continued.
2. Amazon and Adept
In June 2024, Amazon hired CEO David Luan and most of the 100-person team of the AI Startup Adept in a deal with also license from the technology of the startup. At the time, Adept, who had picked up $ 400 million, developed AI agents to perform software tasks, and the deal came before it had launched a product.
A blog post after the deal seemed to suggest that the company was now low in the fund and had to switch to a cheaper business model. “Continue with Adept’s initial plan to build both useful general intelligence and a company agent product would have paid a lot of attention to fundraising …” The post would stated. “Adept will now fully focus on solutions that make agentic AI possible, which are still driven by a combination of our existing state-of-the-art internal models, agentic data, web interaction software and adapted infrastructure.”
In December 2024, Amazon announced It launched a new laboratory led by David Luan that would build AI agents who could “process complex workflows.”
Only about 20 employees remaining With adept after the Amazon deal. Bloomberg noted Only four people are currently mentioned as their employer on LinkedIn.
1. Microsoft and bending
Microsoft started the inverted Acquihire trend last March when it agreed to pay Chatbot Startup Buxe about $ 653 million in a deal that has effectively switched off the startup. The move included hiring founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonya and most of the Inflection staff. Around $ 620 million was for non -exclusive licensing rights on the AI models of Inflection, and a payment of $ 33 million for bending to refrain from any legal claims with regard to hiring its staff.
Inbinging had collected $ 1.3 billion in June 2023. Bloomberg noted CEO Suleyman was concerned about the ability of the company to raise enough money to remain viable in view of the size of his competition.
The deal has one FTC research To determine whether it is designed to prevent Antitrust Review, while Microsoft allows control over bent. Bending is still in operation, but has changed course to concentrate on building new AI models to working on AI in the business space.
Sean White, a former Mozilla director, became the new CEO. White told Bloomberg That bending is still in reconstruction mode: “The ship, over time, was slowly replaced, on board board, piece by piece, right? But it was still the same ship,” he said.
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