Google is in talks with AI startup Mechanize on a deal worth more than $1.5 billion. The company plans to hire some of Mechanize's employees and secure a non-exclusive license to its technology. Those brought on board would help with model evaluation and research.
Mechanize isn't another AI coding assistant. Instead, it builds training and evaluation environments for AI coding agents — places where models can build features, deploy apps, or debug code, and then get graded on how well they did. That data can feed back into reinforcement learning, helping models get better at programming over time.
Mechanize was founded in 2025. Back in April, the startup raised $9.1 million at a post-money valuation of $500 million. Google's proposed deal price is more than three times that valuation.
It's a familiar playbook. Last year, Google spent around $2.4 billion to license Windsurf's technology and brought on its CEO and some of its engineering talent. The company itself stayed behind; the people and tech moved into Google.