Cognition
Creator of Devin, the first fully autonomous AI software engineer
Updated May 2026
Overview
- Website
- cognition.ai
- Founded
- 2023
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California
- Ownership
- Private
- Segment
- AI-Assisted Development
Product overview
Cognition AI, Inc. is an applied AI lab developing autonomous AI agents for software engineering, with its flagship product Devin, an AI software engineer capable of planning, coding, debugging, and collaborating in development workflows. Founded by competitive programmers Scott Wu, Steven Hao, and Walden Yan, the company has grown rapidly through funding rounds reaching $10 billion valuation by 2025 and acquisitions like Windsurf. It serves engineering teams at companies like Nubank and Ramp to boost productivity.
Revenue model
Subscription plans for Devin AI (e.g., $20/month) and enterprise ARR from AI software engineering tools.
Moat
Cognition AI's key competitive moat is its elite talent density, with a founding team boasting 10 IOI gold medals from competitive programmers like Gennady Korotkevich and Andrew He, enabling proprietary advancements in encoding human-like reasoning for complex algorithmic software engineering tasks that competitors struggle to replicate. This is amplified by early-mover advantage in agentic AI depth with Devin, the acquisition of Windsurf for a complete IDE-agent product suite serving blue-chip enterprises like Goldman Sachs and Palantir, and rapid scaling to $73M+ ARR with efficient burn under $20M total.
Headwinds
AI coding agents may struggle with complex enterprise codebases and face regulatory challenges around autonomous code deployment.
Stack lineage
What powers Cognition
- Anthropic
Building an autonomous AI engineer using Claude Platform.
What Cognition powers
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