Cogent

DISAMBIGUATION: The name 'Cogent' is shared by at least three unrelated companies, so this profile required careful verification before writing anything. (1) Cogent Communications Holdings (Nasdaq: CCOI) is a large, decades-old publicly traded internet-backbone/telecom carrier headquartered in Washington, D.C. (domain cogentco.com); there is no evidence Greylock Partners has ever invested in it, and its scale and public-market history make it an implausible match for a Greylock venture portfolio entry. (2) Cogent Systems, Inc. was a South Pasadena/Pasadena, California biometric fingerprint-identification (AFIS) company founded around 1990 by Ming Hsieh and a USC classmate; it IPO'd on Nasdaq as COGT in 2004 and was acquired by 3M in 2010 for roughly $943 million (3M's Identity Management business, including the former Cogent Systems unit, was later sold to Gemalto in 2016-2017). No public source ties Cogent Systems to Greylock Partners as an investor, and its historical ticker COGT has since been reused by an unrelated biotech (Cogent Biosciences). (3) The actual Greylock portfolio company named 'Cogent' (internal slug 'cogent-security') is confirmed directly from Greylock's own portfolio website (greylock.com/portfolio/cogent-security/), whose embedded structured data gives the company's official URL as https://www.cogent.com/ — an exact match to the domain given in the source database (cogent.com) — and lists it under the 'Cybersecurity' domain with the tagline 'AI workforce for vulnerability management,' status 'Active,' and Greylock investors Saam Motamedi and Corinne Riley, with 'firstPartnered' at the Seed stage. This is a brand-new startup (not the 1990s biometrics firm or the telecom carrier): a San Francisco-based applied-AI cybersecurity company, also referred to in press coverage as 'Cogent Security,' that builds autonomous AI agents for enterprise vulnerability management. Given the exact domain match, direct confirmation on Greylock's own site, and extensive contemporaneous news coverage, this AI cybersecurity startup is unambiguously the correct 'Cogent' for this profile.

FOUNDING AND TEAM: Cogent was founded by Vineet Edupuganti (CEO), Geng Sng (CTO), and Thanos Baskous (VP of Engineering). Edupuganti and Sng previously worked together at Abnormal Security (Abnormal AI), where Edupuganti led product strategy and Sng built the company's machine-learning fraud-detection system, which the company says now protects more than half of the Fortune 500; Edupuganti holds a degree from Stanford and Sng from Duke. Baskous previously led infrastructure and large-scale vulnerability remediation at Coinbase, with earlier experience at Blackstone and S&P Capital IQ, and studied computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The company describes itself as incubated in Greylock's 'Edge' program (the same program Greylock says has incubated companies like Palo Alto Networks and Abnormal AI) prior to its public launch.

PRODUCT AND MARKET POSITION: Cogent's platform uses domain-specific AI agents to autonomously discover new vulnerabilities shortly after disclosure, score business risk, generate and execute remediation, and produce audit-ready reporting — explicitly targeting the widening gap between AI-accelerated attackers (who the company says can begin probing new CVEs within minutes of disclosure) and slow, manual human remediation workflows (which the company says still average roughly 60 days). The company later expanded into a research arm, Cogent Research, staffed partly by former Google DeepMind researchers, which has published vulnerability-exploitation studies and, in July 2026, released Cogent VR-1, described as the first 'Mythos-class' frontier AI reasoning model built specifically for cybersecurity, alongside a new benchmark called IntrusionBench.

Business model

B2B enterprise SaaS — sells an agentic-AI vulnerability management platform to enterprise security teams, plus a free community tool (Cogent Community) used as a top-of-funnel product; also operates an applied-research arm (Cogent Research) that publishes benchmarks and models (e.g., VR-1) supporting the commercial platform.

Enterprise software subscription/license fees for the Cogent AI vulnerability-management platform sold to Fortune 500/1000 companies, public companies, and universities; exact pricing not publicly disclosed.