Cognition (Devin) — Net Worth and Career Earnings
Cognition, the San Francisco-based AI coding startup behind Devin — the world's first autonomous AI software engineer — was valued at $10.2 billion in September 2025 following a $400 million funding round led by Founders Fund. As of April 2026, the company is in early talks to raise at a $25 billion valuation — more than double its prior valuation in just eight months. The pace of growth is extraordinary: Devin's annual recurring revenue grew from $1 million in September 2024 to $73 million by June 2025 — a 73x increase in nine months.
Founded in August 2023 by Scott Wu, Steven Hao and Walden Yan — all competitive programmers who won gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics — Cognition built Devin as a fully autonomous AI software engineer capable of handling development projects from inception to completion without constant human supervision. In July 2025, Cognition acquired Windsurf, an AI-native integrated development environment, after Google poached Windsurf's CEO and senior team. The acquisition immediately accelerated growth — combined ARR hit $150-155 million within seven weeks and enterprise customer overlap was less than 5%.
Enterprise customers include Goldman Sachs, Citi, Dell, Cisco, Ramp and Palantir. The Devin 2.0 release in April 2025 introduced a confidence meter that quantifies task success probability. Cognition has raised $696 million in total funding. The strategic question for Cognition is whether autonomous coding agents represent a new budget category — headcount replacement rather than developer tools — which would justify the premium valuation multiples above competitors like Cursor.