The company behind Devin, the AI software engineer
HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States | Founded: 2023 | Employees: Several hundred after the Windsurf acquisition (~200 joined from Windsurf in July 2025) | Stage: Series E; ~$48B valuation (September 2026); $2B+ raised total | Website: https://cognition.ai
Cognition builds AI that writes software. Its main product, Devin, is an autonomous agent that takes a task — fix a bug, migrate a codebase, write tests, ship a feature — and works it end to end: it plans the work, edits files, runs code and tests in its own environment, and opens a pull request for human review. Alongside Devin, Cognition owns Windsurf, an AI-assisted code editor that competes with Cursor and GitHub Copilot.
The company was founded by Scott Wu, Steven Hao and Walden Yan, three members of the competitive-programming community (multiple IOI and TopCoder honours between them). They started in late 2023 with a simple conviction: language models could be turned into a real engineering teammate, not just an autocomplete. The March 2024 Devin demo — an agent resolving GitHub issues and building apps unprompted — went viral and defined the 'AI software engineer' category.
Growth since has been acquisition-shaped as much as product-shaped. In July 2025, after Google licensed Windsurf's technology and hired its CEO in a ~$2.4B deal, Cognition acquired the rest of Windsurf: the product, the brand and roughly 200 employees. That gave the company a two-product business — an agent for whole tasks and an editor for everyday coding — sold together to enterprise engineering teams.
Cognition is the clearest proof that AI coding is not a winner-take-all market — it is a land grab. The company came out of stealth in March 2024 with Devin, a demo of a fully autonomous software engineer that went viral overnight. Two years later it sells both the agent (Devin) and the editor (Windsurf, acquired mid-2025), and by September 2026 it was reportedly approaching $900 million in annualized revenue, up from about $1 million exactly two years earlier.
The Windsurf acquisition is the strategic pivot worth understanding. In July 2025, Google paid roughly $2.4 billion to license Windsurf's technology and hire its CEO; Cognition then bought what remained — the product, the brand and around 200 staff. That gave Cognition both halves of the coding market: an autonomous agent that takes whole tasks, and an IDE where humans write code with AI help. Revenue reportedly went from $73 million annualized in June 2025 to $492 million by May 2026 as the two products cross-sold.
Investors keep paying up because the numbers keep moving: $400 million at a $10.2 billion valuation in September 2025, more than $1 billion at $26 billion in May 2026 (Lux Capital, General Catalyst, 8VC), and a September 2026 round at about $48 billion. The Information has reported expectations of $4–5 billion of annualized revenue by the end of 2026.
The open questions are ordinary but large: can Devin's autonomy hold up on real production codebases as the novelty wears off, can the Windsurf editor hold share against Cursor and GitHub Copilot, and what happens to margins when every task burns frontier-model tokens. Competitors include well-funded specialists (Cursor/Anysphere, Factory, Augment Code) and platform giants (Microsoft/GitHub, OpenAI), so Cognition's bet is that owning both the agent and the editor compounds faster than either alone.
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