Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led Cognition’s latest $400 million funding round. Photo by Nordin Catic/Getty Images for The Cambridge Union
Cognition AI, the San Francisco-based startup known for its A.I. software engineer Devin used by Goldman Sachs, has more than doubled its valuation to $10.2 billion after raising more than $400 million in a round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. The deal, announced yesterday (Sept. 8), also drew participation from existing backers including angel investor Elad Gil, Lux Capital, 8VC, Neo, Definition Capital and Swish VC. The fresh financing marks a stark increase from the $4 billion valuation Cognition received earlier this year.
Cognition was launched in 2023 by Scott Wu, Steven Hao and Walden Yang. Wu, the company’s CEO, previously co-founded Lunchbox, an A.I. networking platform. The founding team also includes alumni of Scale AI, Google DeepMind and self-driving software maker Waymo, as well as a number of elite coders who medaled at the International Olympiad in Informatics, a global programming competition.
Cognition’s flagship product is Devin, an A.I. software engineer. The company also made waves through acquisitions, most notably when it snapped up software firm Windsurf just days after Google hired away much of its leadership. While OpenAI had reportedly pursued Windsurf before complications with its partner Microsoft, Google in July struck a multibillion-dollar licensing deal for Windsurf’s technology and acqui-hired several top staffers. Cognition then acquired what remained of the company: its team, intellectual property and product.
Even before the Windsurf deal, Cognition’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) had climbed rapidly—from $1 million in September 2024 to $73 million by this June, Wu said in a press release. Since the acquisition, ARR has more than doubled. “We’ll continue to invest significantly in both Devin and Windsurf, and our customers are already seeing how powerful the combination is together,” Wu added, noting that clients include Goldman Sachs, Dell and Palantir.
Looking ahead, Cognition plans to expand the ways its users can leverage the combined power of Devin and Windsurf. “We’re looking forward to enabling engineers (to) manage an army of agents to build technology faster,” said Jeff Wang, Windsurf’s interim CEO since former leader Varun Mohan departed for Google, in a LinkedIn post. “It’s been quite an eventful last few months, and now it’s time to show what we’re made of.”
