Cognition is scaling at a ridiculously rapid pace.
The San Francisco-based startup behind the autonomous AI software engineer Devin, has now raised more than $1bn in Series D funding at a $26bn post-money valuation.
Just eight months ago the AI agent lab raised $500m Series C at a $10.2bn valuation. A significant step up.
The round was led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst and 8VC, with support from existing investors including Founders Fund, Alpha Wave, Definition Capital and Bain Capital Ventures. It also saw new investors, including Ribbit Capital, Atreides and Layer Global, join the round.
When Cognition launched in 2023, cloud agents were somewhat of a niche offering, now they’ve reached the mainstream. Its flagship product, Devin, was the first AI software engineer that could independently write, test and deploy code end-to-end without constant human attention.
Cognition's enterprise use has grown by more than 10 times since January and run-rate venue has grown to $492m, according to the startup.
“There’s about 30-35 million software engineers in the world today, and we want to make all of them ten times more efficient,” says Scott Wu, co-founder and CEO of Cognition. “Engineering teams are adopting Devin because they’re able to execute much more aggressively on roadmaps. Being independent and neutral allows us to provide the best model for every different use case, and it’s the best way for us to be aligned with our customers.”
The round shows that, despite the prominence of Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, there is still room for independent AI software coding startups. The company is up against the likes of GitHub Copilot and Cursor, which closed a $2.3bn Series D back in November at a $29.3bn valuation.
Last year Google paid $2.4bn to license Windsurf’s technology, taking on its CEO and about forty of its top employees, with Cognition acquiring the startup’s IP, product and the rest of their staff.
Cognition says it now has a roster of enterprise customers including Citi, Mercedes-Benz, Goldman Sachs, Dell, Santander, the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy. Mercedes-Benz has, according to the startup, reduced its eight month legacy modernisation process to just eight days.
Company info:
Founded by Scott Wu (CEO), Steven Hao (CTO), and Walden Yan (CPO)
More than 250 employees worldwide
Offices in San Francisco, London, Tokyo and Singapore
