Cognition has raised over $400M at a $10.2B post-money valuation led by Founders Fund. Other existing investors are similarly doubling down including Lux Capital and 8VC (who jointly led our previous round), Neo, Elad Gil, Definition Capital, and Swish VC. We’re also joined by new investors including Bain Capital Ventures, Hanabi Capital, and D1 Capital.
We founded Cognition last year to build the future of software engineering. We envision a world of software abundance where engineers become architects, solving the most challenging problems and focusing on their creative visions while tasking an army of autonomous agents to support them on everything else.
Last March when we launched Devin, the AI software engineer, it wasn’t clear that this future would ever become a reality. While Devin could knock some tasks out of the park, for the most part, it was still a very junior engineer.
Today, the baseline has changed drastically. While we are still in the earliest innings of AI code, agents are already doing real work alongside individual developers and within large enterprise engineering teams. As with many technologies throughout history, what first seemed a fringe theory quickly became an obvious reality.
Over the past year, we have observed this shift, first with Devin and now with Windsurf. Before acquiring Windsurf, Cognition’s Devin ARR grew from $1M ARR in September 2024 to $73M ARR in June 2025, as usage increased exponentially. Our growth remained efficient throughout, with total net burn under $20M across the company's entire history.
Our acquisition of Windsurf more than doubled our ARR. More importantly, it gave us the complete product suite for AI coding. Today, the two main forms of AI coding tools are IDEs and agents. Engineers naturally want both: the IDE for when you want to make each decision yourself, with a speedup from AI assistance, and agents to delegate complete tasks asynchronously. We’ll continue to invest significantly in both Devin and Windsurf, and our customers are already seeing how powerful the combination is together.
Growth has accelerated post-acquisition: combined enterprise ARR at Cognition is up over 30% in the seven weeks post buying Windsurf. We had < 5% overlap in enterprise customers pre-acquisition, and combining the rapid adoption of Devin with Windsurf’s IDE product and scaled GTM machine has been a massive unlock. Devin and Windsurf now power category-defining customers including Goldman Sachs, Citi, Dell, Cisco, Ramp, Palantir, Nubank, and Mercado Libre.
Above all, the thing I’m most proud of is our team. We were thrilled to bring on Windsurf’s world-class team and welcome two of our early investors, Christian Lawless (Conversion Capital, Founder & General Partner) and Emily Cohen (Neo, Partner), who made the high-conviction investment to join us full-time. I’m also excited to have swyx joining the team, as a longtime fan of his work from Latent Space to AI Engineer.
When we started Cognition, we were a small group of engineers who shared a lifelong love of coding and more than a decade of friendship. We hunkered down in a New York apartment and built the product we always wanted for ourselves. While many things have changed since then, the core mission to build the future of software engineering remains the same. If that mission excites you, join our team!
Scott
