What is Cognition?

What is Cognition?

Cognition is a San Francisco AI lab founded in 2023 that builds Devin, billed as the first autonomous AI software engineer — an agent that plans, writes, tests, and ships code end-to-end inside its own cloud sandbox. In May 2026 the company raised over $1 billion in a Series D at a $25 billion pre-money / $26 billion post-money valuation, by which point its annualized revenue run-rate had reached roughly $492 million.

Devin works from natural-language requirements: it reads a repository, spins up a Linux shell, code editor, and browser, then plans and executes multi-step tasks — migrating legacy codebases, building features, fixing bugs, and opening pull requests with limited human supervision. Cognition reports that 89% of the code its own engineers commit is now written by Devin, and that enterprise usage grew more than 10x over the first half of 2026, compounding at roughly 50% month-over-month for six straight months.

The company's revenue trajectory is one of the steepest in software. Devin's ARR went from about $1 million in September 2024 to $73 million in June 2025, then to roughly $492 million by May 2026 — and management has publicly targeted crossing $1 billion in run-rate before the end of 2026. A pivotal accelerant was the July 2025 acquisition of Windsurf, the AI-native IDE, which added about $82 million in ARR and more than 350 enterprise customers and gave Cognition both an agent (Devin) and an editor (Windsurf), roughly doubling ARR to about $155 million overnight.

Customers span the largest enterprises, banks, and governments — Goldman Sachs, Citi, Dell, Cisco, Elevance, Ramp, Palantir, Nubank, Mercado Libre, Mercedes-Benz, Santander, NASA, and the U.S. Army and Navy among them. Cognition sits at the autonomous-agent end of the AI-coding market, competing with IDE-led players like Cursor (Anysphere) and incumbents like GitHub Copilot for the budget enterprises spend on AI-assisted engineering.

Sources:More Devins in More Places (Series D) — CognitionCognition raises $1B at $25B pre-money — TechCrunchCognition revenue, valuation & funding — Sacra

What does Cognition offer?

Cognition's lineup centers on Devin, the autonomous coding agent, plus the Windsurf IDE it acquired in 2025 and its own frontier coding models, SWE-1.5 and SWE-grep.

Sources:Cognition AI — WikipediaCognition Business Breakdown — Contrary Research

How does Cognition make money?

Cognition sells Devin and Windsurf via usage-based SaaS subscriptions, metered in Agent Compute Units (ACUs) for enterprise and in fixed monthly plans with included quotas for self-serve, layered with large custom enterprise contracts.

Self-serve pricing runs from a Free tier through Pro at $20/month and Max at $200/month, each with an included usage quota; a Teams plan starts around $80/month with collaboration, centralized billing, and admin controls and bills on usage, while Enterprise is custom. Historically Devin sold a Team plan at $500/month, but Devin 2.0 (April 2025) slashed the entry point to $20. The unit of consumption is the ACU — Cognition's normalized measure of the compute (VM time, model inference, networking bandwidth) a task consumes, roughly 15 minutes of active Devin work, historically billed around $2.00-$2.25 per ACU. For self-serve customers, overage beyond the included quota is now priced and billed in dollars rather than ACUs, while enterprise contracts keep ACU-based metering.

Growth is driven by a land-and-expand motion: individual developers and small teams adopt Devin or Windsurf self-serve, then expansion accelerates inside large enterprises that license the agent to accelerate legacy migrations, raise test coverage, and clear security findings. Cognition cites enterprise usage growing roughly 50% month-over-month and more than 10x over the first half of 2026, with marquee proof points such as Mercedes-Benz completing an eight-month modernization project in eight days.

The economics are unusually capital-efficient. The company has said its total net burn was under $20 million across its entire history through its 2025 raise, and with 89% of its own code written by Devin, headcount stays lean relative to revenue. The Windsurf acquisition added an editor surface and 350+ enterprise accounts, broadening monetization across both the agent (usage-based Devin) and the IDE (multi-seat enterprise deployments).

Sources:New self-serve plans for Devin — CognitionDevin 2.0 cuts price to $20/mo — VentureBeatCognition revenue, valuation & funding — Sacra

Who leads Cognition?

Cognition was co-founded by Scott Wu (CEO), Steven Hao (CTO), and Walden Yan (CPO) — all International Olympiad in Informatics gold medalists who pivoted from crypto to AI in late 2022.

Sources:Cognition Business Breakdown — Contrary ResearchCognition AI — Wikipedia

How do you contact Cognition's leadership?

Cognition has no published personal executive emails. The verified company pattern on the cognition.ai domain is firstname@cognition.ai (first name only); the trycognition.ai domain more often uses first.last (~40%). The addresses below follow that verified format and are inferred, not officially published — verify before outreach.

• Scott WuCo-founder & CEOscott@cognition.ai
• Steven HaoCo-founder & CTOsteven@cognition.ai
• Walden YanCo-founder & CPOwalden@cognition.ai

Sources:Cognition AI email format — RocketReachCognition email format — Clay

How much funding has Cognition raised?

Cognition has raised roughly $1.6 billion across four disclosed primary rounds — most recently over $1 billion in a May 2026 Series D at a $25 billion pre-money / $26 billion post-money valuation; including secondary and tender activity, press reports put total capital raised above $2.5 billion. Either way it is one of the most valuable AI startups in the world less than three years after founding.

The company moved fast from the start. An early-2024 Series A of $21 million, led by Founders Fund, valued Cognition around $350 million. Weeks later, in April 2024, a $175 million Series B — again led by Founders Fund, with 8VC, Khosla Ventures, Conviction, and Elad Gil — pushed the valuation to roughly $2 billion, granting unicorn status barely six months after founding.

After the July 2025 Windsurf acquisition, Cognition closed a $400 million Series C led by Founders Fund (with 8VC, Neo, Elad Gil, Definition Capital, and others) at a $10.2 billion post-money valuation, confirmed in September 2025. That more than doubled the company's prior mark in a single step.

The most recent round, announced May 27, 2026, was a Series D of over $1 billion co-led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC, with participation from Founders Fund, Elad Gil, Ribbit Capital, Atreides, Layer Global, Alpha Wave, and others, at $25 billion pre-money and ~$26 billion post-money. No down-round has been reported — every step has been an up-round, tracking the company's climb from ~$1M to ~$492M in run-rate revenue in roughly 20 months.

Sources:More Devins in More Places (Series D) — CognitionCognition raises $1B at $25B pre-money — TechCrunchCognition valued at $10.2B — CNBC

How did Cognition get here?

From a 2023 founding to a $26B valuation and ~$492M run-rate in under three years — via the Devin launch, the Windsurf acquisition, and a string of up-rounds.

Sources:Cognition AI — WikipediaCognition's acquisition of Windsurf — Cognition

Who are Cognition's competitors?

Cognition competes with IDE-led AI coding tools (Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Replit), labs shipping coding agents (Anthropic's Claude Code), and other autonomous-agent startups (Factory, Poolside).

Sources:Best AI coding agents 2026 — VellumCognition Business Breakdown — Contrary Research