Cognition AI Inc. has raised more than $1 billion in a new funding round at a $26 billion valuation, the latest sign of strong demand for companies using artificial intelligence for software development.
Venture firms Lux Capital, General Catalyst and 8VC co-led the financing, the startup is set to announce on Wednesday. Other investors including Ribbit Capital, Atreides Management LP and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund also participated. Cognition’s valuation, which includes the money raised, has more than doubled from a prior round in September.
Founded in 2023, Cognition’s flagship product is an AI agent called Devin that’s designed to automate the programming process for engineers. The startup said its revenue run rate has increased to $492 million from $37 million last May. Its growth has been driven by selling software to businesses, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Mercedes-Benz Group AG, as well as several parts of the US government.
OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and other leading model makers are increasingly betting on AI coding software as a lucrative and growing market. Elon Musk’s SpaceX also struck a deal last month for a possible $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, another AI coding startup.
Though Cognition’s funding talks kicked off before the Cursor deal, it saw a fresh wave of interest from investors following the SpaceX news, Bloomberg previously reported.
Scott Wu, Cognition’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said his company’s services are complementary to technology from larger AI labs. Cognition, he said, relies on a mix of its own models and software from OpenAI and Anthropic, and can help route customers to the best tools for their needs.
“As the model layer continues to heat up and get more competitive, what we see is that working with the combination of models is actually much better than having to rely on any single model,” he said.
Internally, Cognition’s team leans heavily on Devin. More than 90% of the company’s internal code is now written by the AI agent, Wu said.
Last July, Cognition agreed to buy the remains of coding startup Windsurf after Alphabet Inc.’s Google struck a $2.4 billion deal for Windsurf’s top talent and licensing rights.
Cognition plans to use much of the new funding for refining its models, improving the product experience for customers and potentially making more acquisitions. The startup said it has now raised more than $2.5 billion in funding to date.
