COGNITION AI

Scott Wu was a competitive programming champion (he won IOI gold medals as a teenager) who wanted to build AI that could actually write production software end-to-end, not just autocomplete snippets. He founded Cognition in November 2023 with fellow competitive programmers and AI researchers Steven Hao and Walden Yan.

In March 2024 they released a demo video of Devin completing real engineering tasks autonomously — browsing the internet for documentation, writing working code, finding bugs, and shipping a project — and the internet had a genuine moment. The demo was immediately debated: was this real?

Could AI actually replace software engineers? Founders Fund and the Stripe founders invested $21M on the spot.

A month later, the Series A was $175 million at a $2 billion valuation. It did not stop there.

In July 2025 Cognition acquired the AI coding editor Windsurf, raised $400 million at $10.2 billion that September, and then $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation in May 2026.

Cognition sells Devin — a fully autonomous AI software engineer — to enterprise software teams. Customers pay for the work that Devin completes, measured in tasks or usage time.

Devin is not a chatbot that suggests code — it opens a web browser, reads documentation, writes code, runs tests, debugs errors, and deploys changes autonomously. Enterprise pricing is custom based on team size and task volume.

Since the Windsurf acquisition Cognition also sells the Windsurf editor, and annualised revenue reached about $492 million by May 2026.

Devin, the autonomous AI software engineer. Windsurf, the AI coding editor Cognition acquired in July 2025, along with its SWE-1.6 model, now one of the most used across the product line.

The Cognition API for delegating agent tasks. Plus the software engineering benchmarks and evaluations the company publishes.

Cognition published SWE-bench results showing Devin outperforming other agents on software engineering tasks. It made Devin available through a waitlist, then broader access.

High-profile backer endorsements (Stripe founders, Eric Schmidt, Kevin Durant) amplified visibility. The focus on competitive programming talent as a founding team gave it immediate technical credibility in the developer community.

Devin's March 2024 demo prompted significant scrutiny, with some developers publishing detailed analyses claiming the tasks shown were cherry-picked and that real-world performance was weaker than implied. Cognition pushed back and published benchmarks.

The broader challenge is that software engineering at enterprise scale involves enormous contextual complexity — legacy codebases, ambiguous requirements, security constraints — that autonomous agents handle inconsistently. The "AI software engineer" category is early.

Founders Fund has led round after round. Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Patrick and John Collison, Eric Schmidt and Kevin Durant all came in early.

The $21 million seed landed in March 2024, days after the Devin demo. A $175 million Series A at $2 billion followed within weeks.

Then $400 million at $10.2 billion in September 2025, two months after Cognition bought Windsurf. Then $1 billion at a $26 billion post-money valuation in May 2026.

Total raised is now over $2.5 billion.