Cognition AI

Creator of Devin, the first autonomous AI software engineer that can plan, write, test, and deploy complete software projects from natural-language specifications. In talks for $25B valuation as of April 2026; acquired Windsurf's IP; Devin 2.0 pricing dropped from $500/mo to $20/mo to broaden adoption; $400M round at $10.2B in late 2025.

Devin defined the 'AI software engineer' product category and proved that autonomous end-to-end coding agents are viable, sparking a wave of competitors and a $25B valuation pursuit.

cognition.ai Coding Agents

United Statesprivate

At a glance

Total raised

$806M

last round series c

Headcount

51-200

approximate · public range

Headquarters

San Francisco

United States

Founded

2023

3 years active

Status

Private

Coding Agents

Latest valuation

$10.2B

Series C · 2025

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Funding history

Total raised

$806M

Rounds tracked

Latest stage

Series C

Latest valuation

$10.2B

Date	Stage	Amount	Valuation	Lead investors
Sep 8, 2025	Series C	$400M	$10.2B	Founders Fund
Mar 18, 2025	Series B	$210M	$4B	8VC
Apr 24, 2024	Series B	$175M	$2B	Founders Fund
Mar 12, 2024	Series A	$21M	$350M	Founders Fund

Founder backgrounds

Scott Wu

CEO

Co-founded Cognition in November 2023 after previously serving as CTO and co-founder of Lunchclub, an AI-driven professional networking platform backed by a16z, Lightspeed, and Coatue. Before that, was a decorated competitive programmer who won three gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and began coding at age nine. This deep background in algorithmic problem-solving and AI-powered matching products directly informed the design of Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer that plans, writes, and ships code end-to-end. Known for a technically grounded, systems-minded leadership posture—he has described software engineering as "telling the computer what you want it to do" and treats Devin as a teammate that his own engineering staff work alongside daily.

Steven Hao

CTO

Co-founder and CTO of Cognition AI. Before founding the company, Hao was an early engineer at Scale AI, where he worked across its full product suite including sensor fusion for autonomous vehicles and machine learning systems. He studied mathematics at MIT and is a gold medalist from the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). His competitive programming background directly informed the technical foundations of Devin — the first autonomous AI software engineer capable of planning, writing, testing, and deploying code from natural-language prompts.

Walden Yan

CPO

Earned a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) before studying computer science at Harvard University. Prior to co-founding Cognition, was an early engineer at **Anysphere** — the startup behind Cursor, the AI-native code editor — giving him firsthand experience building AI-powered developer tools. Also served as Managing Partner at Inverted Agency, a boutique product studio. That dual background — competitive programming at the highest level and early engineering on a leading AI coding product — directly informs Cognition's work on Devin, the autonomous AI software engineer.

AI bull / bear

Bull case

Devin defined the autonomous coding-agent category and now holds the pole position as the market races toward mainstream adoption. The 96% price cut from $500 to $20 per month isn't desperation — it's a deliberate land-grab enabled by falling inference costs and maturing model efficiency. At $20, Devin becomes impulse-buy territory for millions of developers, turning a premium tool into a mass-market utility practically overnight. The Windsurf IP acquisition eliminates a direct rival and brings onboard a team that already solved IDE integration and developer UX, accelerating Devin's evolution into a full-stack development environment. Founders Fund led a $400M round at $10.2 billion and talks of a $25 billion valuation are already underway — signaling that insiders see exponential revenue ahead. If Devin captures even 5% of the global developer population at the new price point, the revenue math justifies the valuation. No competitor has matched Devin's end-to-end autonomy from spec to deployed code, and the capital advantage — $806 million total — lets Cognition outspend challengers on talent, compute, and distribution while the category consolidates around a winner.

Bear case

A 96% price collapse from $500 to $20 per month is a distress signal, not a strategy — it reveals that enterprises weren't renewing at premium pricing because Devin's autonomous coding didn't deliver enough reliable value to justify the cost. The $25 billion valuation pursuit, barely seven months after the $10.2 billion round, looks like a momentum play aimed at locking in a headline number before revenue reality catches up. Meanwhile, the competitive landscape is brutal: GitHub Copilot is embedded inside every developer's editor by default, Cursor has grassroots loyalty, and hyperscalers like Google and Amazon can subsidize coding agents to near-zero as loss leaders for cloud compute. The Windsurf acquisition may prove more distraction than accelerant — integrating an acquired codebase and team while simultaneously shipping Devin 2.0 and fighting a pricing war stretches any organization thin. Most critically, Devin's core value proposition — fully autonomous software engineering — remains unproven at scale. If accuracy tops out below the threshold where engineers trust it without supervision, the product becomes a fancy autocomplete, not the paradigm shift the valuation implies.

Generated by deepseek-v4-pro · May 2, 2026Refreshes quarterly · see disclosures

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Leadership

Scott Wu

CEO

in 𝕏

Steven Hao

CTO

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Walden Yan

CPO

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Products

Devin AI
Devin is the flagship autonomous AI software engineer from Cognition. It can plan, write, test, deploy, and debug complete software projects from natural-language specifications. Unlike code assistants that only suggest snippets, Devin operates like a full remote engineer — it can be assigned tasks via Slack, Linear, or GitHub, works inside its own Linux desktop environment, self-verifies its output, and auto-fixes errors. It has passed real-world engineering interviews and is used by Fortune 500 companies for tasks ranging from web development to modernizing legacy COBOL code.
DeepWiki
DeepWiki is a free AI-powered documentation tool that generates rich, browsable docs for any public GitHub repository. Users can replace 'github.com' with 'deepwiki.com' in a repository URL to instantly get AI-generated explanations of the codebase, including architecture overviews, key files, and function-level documentation. It also supports private repositories through a Devin subscription, helping developers quickly grok unfamiliar codebases without reading through thousands of lines of code.
Windsurf
Windsurf is an AI-native integrated development environment (IDE) acquired by Cognition in July 2025. It features a built-in agentic coding assistant that deeply integrates with the editor, enabling developers to generate, refactor, and debug code using natural-language commands directly within their workflow. Windsurf combines the familiarity of a traditional IDE with powerful AI agents that understand project context, making it a front-end for Cognition's autonomous software engineering capabilities.

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