Google reportedly nears $1.5 billion hire-and-license deal for Mechanize

Google is in talks on a deal worth more than $1.5 billion to hire staff from AI coding-agent startup Mechanize and take a non-exclusive license to its technology, people familiar with the talks say.

The structure would mirror Google’s roughly $2.4 billion hire-and-license arrangement for Windsurf’s technology and chief executive, a template large AI companies increasingly use to absorb talent and intellectual property without a conventional acquisition and the antitrust review a full buyout can trigger. The reported Google-Mechanize deal talks are the latest use of that playbook in coding-agent tooling.

Mechanize, based in San Francisco and about a year old, builds environments and evaluations that put frontier coding agents through software-engineering tasks, then scores the results to support reinforcement learning. That kind of eval infrastructure has become valuable as AI labs push models to write and fix code reliably rather than just autocomplete it.

The startup previously raised $9.1 million at a $500 million valuation and is led by chief executive Tamay Besiroglu, a co-founder of the research group Epoch AI. Its backers include Nat Friedman, Patrick Collison and Dwarkesh Patel.

The terms are still changing, and neither Google nor Mechanize has commented. The reported figure rests on unnamed people close to the talks and has not been confirmed by either company, so the price, the headcount involved and whether a deal closes at all remain unsettled.