AI startup Cognition has raised more than $1 billion in a new funding round at a $26 billion valuation. The financing was co-led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC, with participation from Founders Fund, Ribbit Capital, Atreides Management, and several existing backers. The valuation has more than doubled from the company’s previous $10.2 billion mark reached less than a year ago, making Cognition one of the fastest-growing startups in history by valuation growth.
The startup says the fresh capital will primarily be used to improve its AI models, scale infrastructure, enhance customer experience, and pursue additional acquisitions. The firm’s CEO, Scott Wu, has argued that the future of AI coding will not depend on a single large language model but on systems capable of intelligently combining multiple models and tools together. Meanwhile, the latest funding round brings Cognition’s total capital raised to more than $2.5 billion.
Founded in 2023, Cognition became globally known after launching Devin, an AI software engineering agent designed to autonomously perform programming tasks that previously required human developers. Unlike traditional AI coding assistants that mainly suggest snippets and autocomplete functions, Devin is built to independently plan tasks, write production-ready code, debug failures, run tests, browse technical documentation, interact with developer tools, and deploy software with minimal supervision. According to the startup, the product is increasingly being used not as a coding helper but as a full engineering teammate capable of handling large parts of software workflows on its own.
One of the biggest reasons behind the massive funding round is Cognition’s extraordinary business growth. The company revealed that its revenue run rate surged to around $492 million, compared with only about $37 million during the same period last year. The growth has been driven by enterprise adoption of Devin across financial institutions, industrial companies, and government agencies. Customers reportedly include Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, and several divisions of the US government. Internally, Cognition says more than 90% of its own codebase is now written by Devin itself.
Cognition’s rise accelerated significantly after its acquisition of AI coding startup Windsurf in 2025. The deal happened shortly after Google hired several of Windsurf’s top executives and researchers in a separate multi-billion-dollar talent and licensing arrangement. By acquiring the remaining Windsurf business, Cognition gained not only advanced coding-agent technology but also stronger enterprise developer adoption and integrated development environment capabilities. The acquisition helped expand Cognition from a standalone coding agent company into a broader AI software engineering platform competing directly with the largest players in developer infrastructure.
The company’s rapid rise in valuation shows how aggressively investors are betting on AI startups. Cognition was valued at only a few hundred million dollars shortly after launch, then crossed the $2 billion mark in 2024 before jumping to $10.2 billion in 2025 after raising $400 million from investors led by Founders Fund. At that time, annual recurring revenue linked to Devin had reportedly climbed from around $1 million in late 2024 to about $73 million by mid-2025.
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Ashutosh is a Senior Writer at The Tech Portal, largely reporting on new tech, and intersection of technology and business. Ashutosh’s career spans across nearly a decade of technology writing across multiple platforms and languages.
