Cognition Labs

Cognition Labs is the AI company behind Devin — the first fully autonomous AI software engineer. Founded in 2023 by Scott Wu (CEO), Walden Yan, and Steven Hao, the company is now valued at $26 billion post-money on $492 million in annualized recurring revenue, with cumulative funding of roughly $1.7 billion.

The most recent round — more than $1 billion at a $25 billion pre-money valuation announced May 27, 2026 — was led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC, with Ribbit Capital, Atreides, Founders Fund, and Elad Gil participating. The valuation more than doubled from a $10.2 billion post-money mark eight months earlier, a public vote of confidence that standalone coding-agent vendors can hold ground against frontier labs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) pushing their own coding products and against Microsoft pulling Claude Code from its own employees.

Devin 2.0 (April 2025) cut consumer pricing from $500 per month to $20 per month with pay-as-you-go compute at $2.25 per Agent Compute Unit, making autonomous coding agents accessible to individual developers for the first time. Devin's PR merge rate reached 67% (up from 34% year-over-year). Enterprise customers now include Mercedes-Benz, NASA, Goldman Sachs, Santander, Citi, Dell, Cisco, Palantir, Ramp, and Microsoft, and enterprise usage grew roughly 80 times over the past year.

In July 2025, Cognition acquired Windsurf (AI-powered IDE) for $250 million, combining an autonomous coding agent with an AI IDE — the only company currently offering both. The combined entity has roughly 480 employees.

In July 2026, Cognition acquired Poke, a messaging-based AI assistant from The Interaction Company of California, in a deal valued in the low nine figures. Poke — reachable over iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and WhatsApp — stands out less for raw capability than for a conversational personality that jokes and uses slang rather than reading like a tool; users exchanged more than one hundred million messages in its first three months. Cognition plans to fold that interaction style into Devin, a bet that how an AI agent talks to its user is becoming as much a differentiator as the underlying model.

The most concrete product self-validation came in late May 2026, when CEO Scott Wu publicly disclosed that 89 percent of Cognition's own engineering output is committed by Devin (with the acquired Windsurf agent also contributing). Wu paired the metric with an explicit positioning quote — *"We've never thought about it as replacing humans. We are all programmers ourselves"* — and characterized Devin's current capability as somewhere between a junior and a mid-level engineer depending on task complexity. The framing matters editorially: the question for CTOs evaluating autonomous coding agents is no longer "does this work" but "where does it sit in my seniority ladder, and what do my junior and mid-level engineers do next." Cognition's answer is augmentation — agents handle the routine layer so humans focus on architectural and creative problems.