Cognition AI

Cognition AI, Inc. (also known as Cognition Labs, doing business as Cognition) is an American artificial intelligence company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Its principal product is Devin, an autonomous AI coding agent marketed as an "AI software engineer." Devin operates in its own sandboxed development environment with a shell, code editor, browser and toolchain: it can take a task description, plan the work, inspect a repository, set up the environment, edit files, run tests, debug failures, and open a pull request. The company also produces DeepWiki and Devin Desktop, the latter being the rebranded Windsurf agentic IDE.

Cognition was founded in 2023 by competitive programmers Scott Wu (CEO), Steven Hao (CTO) and Walden Yan (CPO), all International Olympiad in Informatics gold medalists. Sources differ on the founding month: Wikipedia's infobox and one deep-dive article state November 2023 (per founders' LinkedIn pages), while the Wikipedia article body states August 2023. Early team members also included Neal Wu, Gennady Korotkevich and Andrew He; as of March 2024 the roughly 10-person team collectively held 10 IOI gold medals. Reported employee count reached 200 in 2026.

Devin was demonstrated publicly in March 2024 and drew both attention and skepticism, with some engineers publishing critiques arguing the launch demo was edited and capabilities overstated. Cognition subsequently expanded into enterprise deployments and, in July 2025, acquired Windsurf. Company-published articles through mid-2026 describe releases including Devin 2.2, Cognition for Government, Devin Desktop, FrontierCode, Devin Fusion and the SWE-1.6/SWE-1.7 models.

Founding story

The three founders met through competitive programming and mathematics competitions and stayed connected over years while working at companies including Scale AI, Waymo and Cursor. Around Thanksgiving 2023 they rented an Airbnb and hacked with friends on agentic loops for competitive programming problems; early prototypes were individual agents that returned only finished code. They were motivated by two theses: that high-compute reinforcement learning would surpass imitation-trained models, and that products would shift from text completion to multi-step agents, with code as the natural first domain because it provides its own verification feedback loop.

Business model

Cognition sells access to Devin and related agent products to engineering organizations rather than through a public self-serve price list; one review notes there is no public pricing page and describes custom enterprise contracts with long sales cycles. A separate account reports that in April 2026 pricing moved to a consumption-oriented model of $20 per month plus $2.25 per Agent Compute Unit (roughly 15 minutes of active agent work), down from a prior $500 per month. Revenue is recurring and usage-expanding, with the company reporting annualized run-rate revenue growth as enterprise customers embed Devin in their software development lifecycle.

Subscription and usage-based fees for autonomous coding agent capacity (monthly seat fee plus per-Agent-Compute-Unit charges as of April 2026), alongside custom enterprise agreements; the company reported $492 million annualized run-rate revenue in May 2026 and a run rate approaching $1 billion by August 2026.

Traction

Reported annualized revenue grew from about $1 million ARR for Devin in September 2024 to $37 million in May 2025 and $492 million in May 2026, with a run rate nearing $1 billion by August 2026 and a public target of $1 billion annualized revenue before year-end 2026. The Windsurf acquisition added $82 million in ARR, more than 350 enterprise customers and hundreds of thousands of daily active users with less than 5% customer overlap; combined enterprise ARR rose more than 30% in the seven weeks after closing. Cognition also reports that 89% of code committed internally is written by Devin, and cites customer outcomes including Mercedes-Benz compressing an eight-month modernization project into eight days, Itau automatically resolving 70% of security vulnerabilities, and a Visma case study describing doubled developer productivity and halved project costs.

Latest developments

In May 2026 Cognition raised more than $1 billion at a $26 billion post-money valuation; in August 2026 Bloomberg reported the company was in early talks for a new round of more than $1 billion at a valuation of at least $40 billion, with annualized revenue nearing $1 billion. Product announcements posted on the company site in 2026 include Devin 2.2 (February), Cognition for Government (February), an early preview of SWE-1.6 (March), Devin in Windsurf (April), Devin Desktop and the AI Productivity Guarantee (June), FrontierCode (June), Devin Fusion (June) and SWE-1.7 (July). A July 2026 post announces "Welcoming The Interaction Company."