Cognition raises $1 billion at $26 billion valuation

Cognition, a two-year-old startup behind the AI coding agent Devin, has raised $1 billion in funding at a $26 billion valuation. CEO Scott Wu, who started coding when he was nine, has a background in competitive programming. According to a profile by the publication Colossus, Wu won a nationwide math competition as a second-grader, which introduced him to other figures in the industry, including Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang.

The company is pushing a vision of self-driving software development, where AI agents handle engineering tasks end to end. According to Cognition, Devin naturally owns tasks from start to finish. This shift is already visible within the company’s own operations: Cognition reports that 89% of the code committed by its engineers was committed by Devin, with the remainder handled by local agents in Windsurf, an AI coding competitor. Wu explains that the agent’s role is largely focused on long-tail maintenance tasks that developers often prefer to avoid, such as updating old software or migrating applications between platforms.

Despite the high volume of automated commits, Wu argues that the technology is not intended to make human programmers obsolete. “We’ve never thought about it as replacing humans. I know it’s like a scenario, folks have said these things. It has never been our view,” Wu, the CEO of Cognition, told TechCrunch. Instead, Wu explains that the tool is meant to act as a helper that assists developers in building more, freeing them to focus on the creative aspects of software creation. He noted that Devin currently operates at a skill level somewhere between a junior and a mid-level engineer.

Looking forward, the concept of self-driving software may involve recursive development, where an AI improves itself to work at higher levels. Wu expects this trend to expand beyond software engineering into other industries, such as customer service and medicine. However, he maintains that human oversight remains essential, stating that it should always be up to the human to decide what actions to take across all professions.

Why it matters

As AI agents transition from experimental projects to enterprise tools, Cognition’s valuation highlights the market’s belief that autonomous software development will fundamentally change the economics of coding, even as founders push back against the narrative of human obsolescence.