Cognition raises $1B at $26B valuation as Devin AI software engineer writes 90% of its own code

AI coding startup Cognition raises $1B at $25B pre-money valuation | TechCrunch

Cognition, the makers of the autonomous AI software engineer named Devin, has raised more than $1 billion at a $25 billion pre-money valuation, the company announced on Wednesday. That's a major leap from its $10.2 billion post-money valuation when it closed a $400 million funding round just eight months ago in September. The round was led by Lux Capital and General Catalyst, with existing investors pouring in, including Founders Fund, 8VC, and others. The round also included new investors Ribbit Capital, Atreides, and Layer Global. This is a giant vote of confidence from top-tier VCs that there will be room for independent AI software coding startups. Last year, all signs pointed to model makers swallowing this hot market themselves. Certainly Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, and maybe even Google's coding agent Jules, (after Google's acqui-hire deal of Windsurf last year), have captured a lot of it. But Cognition, which acquired the remaining bits of Windsurf last year, says it counts big enterprises like Mercedes-Benz, NASA, Goldman Sachs, and Santander as customers. It also says it's reached $492 million in annualized revenue run-rate as enterprise usage of Devin has grown 50% month over month for the past six months.

Cognition raises $1B at $26B valuation for AI coding agent

The maker of Devin, the AI coding agent, has grown revenue from $37 million to $492 million in a single year, with Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, and the US government among its customers Cognition AI has raised more than $1 billion in new funding at a $26 billion valuation, more than doubling its worth since a September round that valued the company at $10.2 billion. The round was co-led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC, with participation from Ribbit Capital, Atreides Management, and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. The company has now raised more than $2.5 billion in total funding. The numbers behind the valuation tell the story. Cognition's revenue run rate has grown from $37 million in May 2025 to $492 million today, a 13-fold increase in 12 months. The company says it aims to cross $1 billion in annualised revenue later this year. Its customers include Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, NASA, Santander, and several parts of the US government. Cognition's flagship product is Devin, an AI agent designed to automate the programming process end-to-end. Unlike code completion tools that suggest lines or blocks of code while a human developer writes, Devin operates as a full coding agent that can take a task description and produce working software autonomously. It plans, writes, debugs, and deploys code across complex multi-step workflows. The most striking claim comes from inside Cognition itself. Scott Wu, the company's co-founder and CEO, said that more than 90% of the company's internal code is now written by Devin. That figure, if accurate, makes Cognition one of the most aggressive practitioners of its own product in the history of enterprise software. It is a company that has automated its own engineering function using the tool it sells to automate engineering functions at other companies. Cognition runs Devin on a mix of its own proprietary models and models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Wu framed this as a strategic advantage rather than a dependency. As the model layer gets more competitive, he said, working with a combination of models produces better results than relying on any single provider. Cognition routes customers to the best tools for their specific needs, positioning itself as an orchestration layer rather than a model company. Cognition's raise lands in the hottest category in venture capital. Cursor, the AI coding editor built by Anysphere, hit $2 billion in annual recurring revenue in roughly three years and was in talks to raise $2 billion at a $50 billion valuation before SpaceX struck a deal in April for the right to acquire the company for $60 billion. OpenAI and Anthropic are both investing heavily in coding capabilities within their foundation models. Salesforce expects to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens this year, primarily for coding use cases. The competitive dynamics are unusual. Cognition uses models from OpenAI and Anthropic, the same companies that are building competing coding products. Wu addressed this directly, arguing that Cognition's value is in the agent layer, the orchestration, planning, and execution logic that sits on top of foundation models, rather than in the models themselves. This is a bet that the model layer will commoditise while the agent layer captures durable value. It is also a bet that OpenAI and Anthropic will not build equally capable agent products that undercut their own API customers. Cognition is also growing through acquisition. In July 2025, the company acquired the remaining assets of Windsurf, a coding startup that had been the subject of a bidding war between OpenAI and Google. Google ultimately struck a $2.4 billion deal for Windsurf's top engineering talent and licensing rights, while Cognition picked up what was left, including technology, customers, and employees who chose not to join Google. The Windsurf deal illustrates the consolidation dynamics at play. AI-native enterprise spending surged 94% year on year in early 2026 while traditional SaaS growth cooled to 8%, and the capital flowing into AI coding tools is driving a wave of acquisitions, talent raids, and competitive positioning that resembles the early days of cloud computing compressed into months rather than years. Cognition said it plans to use the new funding to refine its models, improve the customer experience, and potentially make more acquisitions. Wu emphasised on Bloomberg Television that the raise allows Cognition to remain independent, a pointed comment given the SpaceX-Cursor deal and the broader trend of AI startups being absorbed by larger platforms. Whether Cognition can stay independent at this scale and growth rate is the open question. The company is valued at $26 billion with $492 million in revenue, a multiple of roughly 53 times. That valuation holds only if growth continues at its current pace and the AI coding market does not compress around a few dominant players. Every major software company is building AI coding capabilities, and the foundation model providers are steadily improving their native coding performance with every model release. Cognition's defence is execution speed and the claim that the agent layer, not the model layer, is where enduring value lives. If Devin can genuinely automate 90% of a company's coding output, the product is not a developer tool. It is a replacement for a significant portion of the software engineering workforce. That is the same logic driving layoffs at Meta and Microsoft, where companies are converting payroll budgets into AI infrastructure spending. Cognition is selling the tool that makes that conversion possible. Founded in 2023, Cognition went from a demo that went viral on social media to a $26 billion company in less than three years. The speed is unprecedented, but so is the market it is operating in. AI coding is not a niche product category. It is a direct bet on the proposition that software can write itself, and that the companies that automate programming fastest will capture a disproportionate share of the $600 billion global software market.

Cognition Raises $1 Billion to Expand AI-Powered Software Engineer | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. As the company said in its announcement Wednesday (May 27), Cognition reached that valuation after raising more than $1 billion in a new Series D funding round, financing it will use for its AI software engineer "Devin." "We launched Devin two years ago as the first AI software engineer," the company said. "Since then, cloud agents have gone from niche to mainstream, and today they are the fastest growing way to create software." The announcement added that Cognition's enterprise usage has increased more than ten times over since the beginning of the year, with its run-rate revenue reaching $492 million. It works with the likes of Citi, Mercedes-Benz, Goldman Sachs, and both the U.S. Army and Navy. "Customers are delivering real outcomes with this leverage. Mercedes-Benz cut an eight-month legacy modernization project down to eight days," the announcement said. "Itaú, Latin America's largest bank, fixes 70% of security vulnerabilities automatically with Devin." The company's new valuation is more than double the $10 billion figure Cognition reached in a funding round last year. Now, Cognition is "shifting to a world of self-driving software development," the announcement added. "Individual engineers are able to spend more of their time on the creative structuring of problems and tasks, and their army of Devins reliably executes." In other AI news, PYMNTS wrote recently about the cost pressures associated with AI adoption, which are "real and getting harder to ignore." The report cited an interview in The Information with Uber's chief technology officer, Praveen Neppalli Naga, who said the AI budget he'd planned had exceeded projections, driven by surging internal use of Anthropic's Claude Code. Around 11% of live updates to Uber's back-end systems are now written by AI agents, compared to a fraction of a percent three months earlier, per PYMNTS coverage. Uber's research and development expenses jumped 9% to $3.4 billion in 2025. "That pattern of usage surging past projections while cost controls lag, recurs across enterprise deployments," PYMNTS wrote. "AI tools don't carry fixed license fees. Every interaction consumes compute, measured in tokens and organizations that actively push adoption learn that costs scale in kind." The adoption problem goes beyond cost management, the report said. EY research found that 78% of U.K. companies believe AI is either fully or mostly implemented in their operations, but nearly half say their approach does not meet the demands of autonomous AI systems.