Cognition AI closed a $400 million funding round at a $10.2 billion post-money valuation. Founders Fund, the Peter Thiel-backed VC, led Cognition’s latest round, with participation from existing investors like Lux Capital, Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC, Elad Gil, Definition Capital, and Swish Ventures. The raise comes after a year of rapid revenue growth, a major acquisition, and a strategy built around its coding agent, Devin.
Founded in 2023 by Scott Wu, Walden Yan, and Steven Hao, Cognition set out to change how engineering teams work. The founders envisioned engineers working as architects who focus on design and problem-solving, while repetitive tasks are delegated to autonomous agents.
Scott Wu, Cognition’s Chief Executive and co-founder, has described this model as creating “software abundance.” He said, “We envision a world where engineers become architects, solving the most challenging problems and focusing on their creative visions while tasking an army of autonomous agents to support them on everything else.”
That vision has been paired with measurable results. The company reported that Devin’s annual recurring revenue climbed from $1 million in September 2024 to $73 million by June 2025. Net cash burn has remained under $20 million since its founding.
Reducing Engineering Toil
Wu has explained that Cognition’s strength lies in reducing what he calls “engineering toil.” He defined this as the bulk work of software maintenance, including migrations, version upgrades, documentation, test creation and issue triaging.
He noted that in enterprise environments, Cognition typically delivers “speed-ups of around eight to fifteen times.” That efficiency means tasks requiring eight hours of human effort can be done in one hour with Devin. Wu said this impact has encouraged some enterprises to take on projects internally that would previously have been outsourced.
One example he shared was a major Latin American bank. The institution initially adopted Devin to handle refactors and migrations. Within months, the contract expanded tenfold as the bank realized engineers were becoming more productive and projects were completing faster.
Windsurf Acquisition
In July 2025 Cognition acquired Windsurf, a rival startup focused on integrated developer environments. Wu said the combination more than doubled Cognition’s annual recurring revenue and gave the company a stronger commercial reach. Enterprise revenue grew by more than 30 percent in the seven weeks following the acquisition.
Wu observed that engineers prefer to work with both categories of tools. “Developers naturally want both, the IDE for when you want to make each decision yourself with a speedup from AI assistance, and agents to delegate complete tasks asynchronously,” he said. Bringing Devin and Windsurf together created what he called “a massive unlock” for customers.
This combined approach has helped Cognition win clients such as Goldman Sachs, Citi, Dell, Cisco, Ramp, Palantir, Nubank and Mercado Libre.
Security and Reliability
As adoption grows, questions about code quality and vulnerabilities have become more prominent. Wu acknowledged these concerns, explaining that security has always been a challenge in engineering. He said Cognition approaches agent-generated code with the same governance processes already common in enterprises, including code review and controlled merges.
He added that specialized agents for security could emerge over time but emphasized that existing safeguards remain effective. “This is a problem that all engineering orgs have already had to think about,” Wu said. “You don’t allow people to just merge their code straight to master, and similarly, you want to have processes in place for your AI agents.”
Wu also noted that adoption of Cognition’s tools is influencing how enterprises structure their engineering teams. Instead of reducing headcount, many customers are expanding their teams to capture more value. He explained, “If every engineer is worth way more, then obviously you want more engineers. You want to add more engineers.”
This shift shows how companies are choosing to reinvest productivity gains into expanding project scope rather than shrinking costs. Tasks once considered too expensive, such as large replatforming efforts, are now being executed internally at greater speed.
Competitive Market
The broader market for coding tools is highly competitive. GitHub Copilot, Amazon’s Kiro, Google-backed Windsurf before its acquisition, Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and startups such as Replit and Sourcegraph are each pursuing developer adoption.
Most competitors emphasize either autocomplete support inside editors or fully autonomous task execution. Cognition now offers both. By integrating Windsurf’s IDE with Devin’s agent framework, the company proved itself differently from rivals that provide only one type of tool.
Cognition’s internal culture has been described as demanding, with expectations of long hours and high output from engineers. That intensity has supported rapid development and growth but may present challenges as the company expands. Sustaining morale, retaining talent and building processes that support larger teams will be essential as more enterprises adopt the platform.
Wu summarized the outlook in simple terms: “The job’s not finished. It’s barely even started.”
