AI coding startup Cognition has raised more than $1 billion in new funding at a $26 billion valuation.
The round was led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC, with participation from existing backers including Founders Fund, Elad Gil, Bain Capital Ventures, and others. New investors included Ribbit Capital, Atreides, and Layer Global.
According to Bloomberg, the valuation more than doubled from Cognition’s previous funding round in September. The company said it has now raised over $2.5 billion to date. Founded in 2023, Cognition is best known for Devin, an autonomous AI coding agent designed to handle software engineering tasks with minimal human involvement.
Cognition said enterprise usage of Devin has grown more than tenfold since the beginning of the year, while its revenue run rate climbed to $492 million. The company counts major organizations among its customers, including Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, Dell Technologies, Santander, US Army, and US Navy.
Inside Devin’s enterprise growth
In its announcement, Cognition said customers are already seeing measurable gains from using Devin. The company claimed Mercedes-Benz reduced “an eight-month legacy modernization project down to eight days,” while Brazilian banking giant Itaú now fixes “70% of security vulnerabilities automatically with Devin.”
According to reports, Cognition’s annualized revenue run rate jumped from $37 million last May to nearly half a billion dollars today, driven largely by enterprise demand.
As competition intensifies in AI coding software, Cognition is positioning itself differently from companies building foundation AI models. The startup said it works with multiple model providers rather than relying on a single AI system. Its platform combines internally developed models with technology from rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Bloomberg quoted Cognition co-founder and CEO Scott Wu as saying: “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.”
Cognition says it evaluates model performance across more than 100 software engineering task categories to balance speed, cost, and efficiency for customers. The company also recently launched SWE-1.6, a model it says has become the most-used model within Windsurf due to its speed and cost advantages.
AI writing AI
One of the company’s most striking claims is how heavily it now depends on its own technology internally. Cognition noted in its announcement, “89% of code committed by our engineers is committed by Devin.”
The startup described this as evidence of what it calls “self-driving software development,” where engineers spend less time manually coding and more time structuring problems and overseeing AI agents.
What comes next
Cognition said the new funding will be used to improve its models, refine the customer experience, and potentially pursue more acquisitions. The company also says it is hiring aggressively as demand for AI-assisted software development continues to surge.
“We’re now shifting to a world of self-driving software development,” Cognition wrote. “Individual engineers are able to spend more of their time on the creative structuring of problems and tasks, and their army of Devins reliably executes.”
Also read: xAI’s Grok Build brings another coding agent into developer terminals as AI software tools compete for engineering workflows.