- Cognition raised $2 billion in a Series E round, doubling its valuation to $48 billion in four months.
- Devin’s run-rate revenue jumped from $492 million to nearly $900 million since May.
- The raise comes as Cognition’s cash burn could hit $800 million this year on compute costs alone.
Nine months ago, Cognition chief executive Scott Wu told a shrinking staff that “we don’t believe in work-life balance” after cutting 30 jobs.
It was not a great look. It also hasn’t slowed the company down: Cognition, the startup behind autonomous coding agent Devin, has raised $2 billion in a Series E round at a $48 billion valuation, up from $26 billion just four months ago.
Doubling in four months
Andreessen Horowitz and Accel led the round as new investors, joined by returning backers Founders Fund, General Catalyst and Avenir, alongside a syndicate that includes Benchmark, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock and Nvidia.
Avenir called the check it wrote “the largest Avenir has ever written,” saying in a post on X that “Cognition and Scott Wu saw the shift from autocomplete to autonomous agents before nearly everyone.”
Cognition, founded in 2023 by competitive programmers Wu, Steven Hao and Walden Yan, says its run-rate revenue has climbed from $492 million in May to nearly $900 million now, helped by last year’s acquisition of Windsurf, which folded a rival coding tool’s enterprise base into Devin’s.
Devin faces a crowded AI coding market
The valuation lands Cognition at roughly 53 times run-rate revenue, and it now sits inside a market where being second matters less than being funded.
Anysphere’s Cursor was acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion in August, after Cursor’s revenue had exceeded $2 billion, meaning Cognition is now commanding a higher revenue multiple than Cursor did before it was sold.
Poolside, the other major independent player, never closed the $2 billion round it was chasing last year; instead, it ran out of compute, and Nvidia stepped in with a $6 billion licensing deal plus a $1 billion investment at a $12 billion valuation, absorbing more than 100 Poolside engineers in the process.
Two of Cognition’s closest rivals lost to their own GPU bills. Cognition leases its Nvidia cluster rather than owning it, a decision The Information reports could push cash burn to $800 million this year. The company is training its own models on open-source foundations to cut reliance on OpenAI and Anthropic, the same move Cursor made before it ran out of runway.
The AI code tools market is projected to reach $26 billion by 2030, a fraction of the combined valuation now sitting inside just three companies. Investors say the market itself grows into that gap rather than one company eating the others alive.
Cognition is reportedly targeting $4 billion to $5 billion in annualised revenue by the end of 2026. Whether it gets there on its own compute, or ends up leasing its way into the same corner Poolside and Cursor found themselves in, is the question the next round will actually answer.
