Cognition company profile: valuation, funding & revenue

This Cognition company profile covers the company's valuation, revenue, funding rounds, investors and history. Cognition works in artificial intelligence, with a focus on AI software engineering agents. It was founded in 2023 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States. Its latest valuation on record is US$48 billion (September 2026). Every figure links to a public source, and anything the company hasn't disclosed is marked as such.

Revenue

Funding history

Cognition timeline

Key dates from the sources on this page, oldest first. Metric snapshots are listed after the funding events.

• 2023 — Cognition is founded in San Francisco by Scott Wu (CEO), Steven Hao and Walden Yan.
• Early 2024 — Equity round: US$21M, valuing the company at About US$350M. Investors: Founders Fund.
• Apr 2024 — Equity round: US$175M, valuing the company at About US$2B. Investors: Founders Fund (lead).
• Mar 2025 — Equity round: See source, valuing the company at About US$4B. Investors: 8VC (lead).
• Sep 2025 — Equity round: See source, valuing the company at About US$10B.
• May 2026 — Series D: More than US$1B, valuing the company at About US$26B. Investors: Lux Capital, General Catalyst, 8VC (leads).
• Sep 2026 — Series E: More than US$2B, valuing the company at US$48B. Investors: Andreessen Horowitz and Accel (leads); Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Avenir.
• August 2026 — Later reports: Reported valuation of about US$26 billion by May 2026 and talks at US$40 billion or more in August 2026; terms not officially confirmed.
• 2026 — Employees: About 200.

Investors

Overview

Cognition builds AI agents that write software. Its best-known product, Devin, was introduced in March 2024 as "the first AI software engineer": an agent that can take a task, such as fixing a bug, adding a feature or migrating code to a new framework, plan the work, write and test code in its own development environment, and open a pull request for human review. In 2025 Cognition acquired Windsurf, a popular AI-powered code editor, giving it a tool for developers who want to work alongside AI rather than delegate whole tasks. Windsurf was later rebranded as Devin Desktop.

Scott Wu, the CEO, Steven Hao and Walden Yan founded Cognition in San Francisco in 2023. Several of its founding team are former gold medallists at the International Olympiad in Informatics, a competition for the world's best young programmers, which became part of the company's story. Cognition has grown from a small research-heavy team to roughly 200 employees while its valuation has risen faster than almost any other software company.

Products

• Devin: an autonomous coding agent that works in the background on tasks assigned through tools such as Slack, Jira or GitHub. Teams can run many Devin sessions in parallel, each working on a separate task.
• Devin Desktop (formerly Windsurf): an AI-native code editor where developers write code with AI suggestions, chat and agent help directly in the editor.
• DeepWiki: a tool that generates documentation and explanations for code repositories, helping developers understand unfamiliar codebases.

Combining a hands-off agent with a hands-on editor gives Cognition two ways into engineering teams: individual developers who want help while they code, and managers who want to hand whole categories of work, such as dependency upgrades or test writing, to agents.

The Windsurf acquisition

Windsurf, originally called Codeium, had been one of the fastest-growing AI coding tools. In mid-2025, OpenAI's planned acquisition of Windsurf fell apart, and Google then hired Windsurf's CEO and several senior researchers in a licensing and hiring deal reported at about US$2.4 billion. Days later, Cognition signed an agreement to acquire the rest of Windsurf: its product, brand, customers and most of its remaining employees. The deal gave Cognition an established editor with enterprise customers and significant recurring revenue, and turned it into one of the largest players in AI coding almost overnight.

Business model

Cognition sells subscriptions to individual developers and teams, and enterprise contracts that include usage of Devin, typically measured in "agent compute units" or similar credits that reflect how much work the agent does. The editor product is sold per seat. Enterprise deals are increasingly important, because large companies with big codebases and long backlogs of maintenance work can put agents to use at scale. Cognition doesn't publish its revenue; secondary sources have published annualised revenue estimates in the hundreds of millions of dollars, which we haven't confirmed, so we show revenue as not disclosed.

Funding history

Cognition's valuation has risen at a striking pace:

• Early 2024: about US$21 million from Founders Fund at roughly US$350 million.
• April 2024: about US$175 million led by Founders Fund at roughly US$2 billion, making it a unicorn within months of launching Devin.
• March 2025: a round led by 8VC at about US$4 billion.
• September 2025: a round at about US$10 billion, after the Windsurf acquisition.

Reports in 2026 described a valuation of about US$26 billion by May and, in August, early talks with investors at a valuation of at least US$40 billion. We haven't seen official confirmation of those terms, so the data above uses the September 2025 figure and lists the later reports separately. Investors associated with the company include Founders Fund, 8VC, Lux Capital and General Catalyst.

Competition

AI coding is one of the most crowded and fastest-moving areas of AI. Cognition competes with Cursor, which was the leading AI code editor before reports of an agreement to be acquired by SpaceX; GitHub Copilot from Microsoft; Anthropic's Claude Code; OpenAI's Codex; Google's coding tools; and app-building platforms such as Replit and Lovable. Many of these competitors also supply the AI models that coding tools depend on, which creates a strategic tension: Cognition needs strong models from companies that are also its rivals.

Cognition's advantages are its focus on autonomous agents for real engineering work, the Windsurf editor's installed base, and a reputation for strong engineering talent.

Cognition at a glance

Cognition is a San Francisco AI company founded in 2023 by Scott Wu, Steven Hao and Walden Yan. It makes the Devin autonomous coding agent and acquired the Windsurf editor in 2025, later renamed Devin Desktop. Its valuation rose from about US$350 million in early 2024 to about US$2 billion in April 2024, US$4 billion in March 2025 and about US$10 billion in September 2025, with reports in 2026 describing much higher figures.

What AI coding agents change

For decades, software development has been limited by the number of skilled engineers. AI coding tools first helped by completing lines of code; agents like Devin aim to complete whole tasks. That doesn't remove the need for engineers, who still decide what to build, design systems, and review and take responsibility for code, but it changes how they spend their time. Companies with large legacy codebases see particular value in using agents for repetitive work such as upgrading libraries, adding tests, fixing security vulnerabilities and migrating systems, work that often sits in backlogs for years.

The open questions are about quality and trust. Agents can produce code that looks right but contains subtle errors or security problems, and reviewing large volumes of AI-written code takes time. Companies that get the most from agents tend to invest in good tests, clear coding standards and review processes, which help catch mistakes before they reach production.

Why valuations in AI coding are so high

AI coding tools have grown revenue faster than almost any other software category, because developers adopt them quickly and companies see clear productivity gains. Investors also see the potential to capture a share of the enormous amount companies spend on software engineering salaries, not just software tools budgets. That logic has pushed valuations for leading coding companies into the tens of billions of dollars within a few years of founding. Our guide to SaaS valuation multiples explains how investors justify such prices, and our guide to the most valuable AI startups compares Cognition with peers.

Questions for engineering leaders

• Which types of tasks in your backlog are well defined enough to delegate to an agent?
• How strong is your test coverage, so agent-written changes can be verified automatically?
• How will you measure productivity gains and code quality over time?
• What security and data controls apply when an agent accesses your codebase?

Latest developments (October 2026)

Cognition's valuation rose sharply in 2026. In May it raised more than US$1 billion in a Series D led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst and 8VC at about US$26 billion, and on 8 September 2026 it announced a Series E of more than US$2 billion at US$48 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel with Founders Fund, General Catalyst and Avenir, according to Dealroom and the company's legal adviser Latham & Watkins. Cognition said annualised run-rate revenue rose from about US$492 million in May to nearly US$900 million. This supersedes the 2025 valuation described earlier on this page. See our AI coding guide.

What to watch

Watch for confirmation of new funding rounds, revenue disclosures, enterprise adoption of Devin, competition with Claude Code, Codex and Copilot, and consolidation in AI coding as larger companies acquire tools.

Takeaways

Engineering teams can trial agents on narrow, well-tested tasks first. Founders can see how quickly a focused AI product can raise capital. Investors should separate confirmed rounds from reported talks in a market where headlines move faster than closings.

Sources

Every figure on this page comes from the public sources below. Where sources disagreed, we used the company's own announcement or a primary news report. Private-company data changes; check the date beside each figure.

1. Latham & Watkins
2. Wikipedia
3. SiliconANGLE