- Cognition has raised over $1 billion in a Series D at a $26 billion valuation, led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC
- Enterprise usage of its AI software engineer Devin has grown more than 10x in 2026, with annualised run-rate revenue hitting $492 million
- 89% of code committed by Cognition’s own engineers is now written by Devin – the clearest signal yet that AI-native development is no longer theoretical
Mercedes-Benz needed eight months to modernise a legacy system. Devin did it in eight days. That single data point tells you more about where software engineering is heading than any funding announcement could.
Cognition, the San Francisco-based AI agent lab founded in November 2023 by Scott Wu (CEO), Steven Hao (CTO), and Walden Yan (CPO), has raised over $1 billion in Series D funding at a $26 billion valuation. The round was led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC, with participation from returning investors Founders Fund, Elad Gil, Alpha Wave, Bain Capital Ventures, Vitruvian, Definition Capital, Conversion Capital, and 137 Ventures, alongside new backers Ribbit Capital, Atreides, and Layer Global. The raise is a sharp step up from the company’s $400M round at a $10.2B valuation in September 2025, and from the $500M raise that followed its Windsurf acquisition just months later.
Cognition builds autonomous AI agents for software engineering. Its flagship product, Devin, launched two years ago as the first AI software engineer capable of independently writing, testing, and deploying code end-to-end – without human hand-holding at each step. In July 2025, Cognition expanded its platform by acquiring Windsurf – the AI code editor whose founders had just been poached by Google – in a deal that added hundreds of thousands of daily users and significant enterprise revenue to its base. Windsurf’s proprietary SWE-1.6 model has since become one of the most-used models across Cognition’s product suite.
The company’s client base now spans finance, defence, and automotive: Citi, Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, Dell, Santander, the US Army, and the US Navy all use Devin in production. Latin America’s largest bank, Itaú, resolves 70% of security vulnerabilities automatically using Devin. Systems integrators Infosys and Cognizant have embedded it into client delivery workflows.
In the competitive AI coding market, Cognition goes up against GitHub Copilot, backed by Microsoft, and Cursor, which closed a $2.3 billion Series D in November 2025 at a $29.3 billion valuation and is currently in talks to raise a further $2 billion at a $50 billion valuation. The key distinction: both Copilot and Cursor assist human engineers in writing code; Devin takes ownership of the task itself and executes it autonomously. As TFN reported in April, Cognition was already eyeing a $25B valuation before this round closed – it has now blown past that figure entirely.
Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC have previously backed companies including Zipline, Wealthfront, and Anduril, signalling comfort with deep-tech bets that carry long commercial development cycles before reaching scale.
The unanswered question is not whether AI agents will reshape software development – Cognition’s own numbers make that case already. The question is whether enterprises will let them operate unsupervised at scale, and how quickly legal, security, and compliance functions catch up to what engineering teams are already running in production.
