Cognition Raises Over $2B at $48B Valuation

The vibe-coding market’s valuations keep climbing at a startling pace. In August, AI coding tool Cursor was acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion, setting a new price ceiling for the category. Now Cursor’s direct rival has posted an even steeper markup. The AI coding-agent company that raised over $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation last May has closed another mega-round just four months later, nearly doubling its valuation.

From Devin to an Independent Agent Lab

Cognition, founded in 2024, made its name with Devin, a cloud-based, fully autonomous coding agent. Last July, it acquired coding IDE Windsurf after OpenAI’s own acquisition talks for the company fell through, giving Cognition both a cloud-based autonomous agent (Devin) and a local-IDE assistant (Windsurf) under one roof.

The company describes itself as an “independent agent lab” that isn’t tied to any single foundation model, working with all the major model labs to give customers the best combination for their needs. It’s also reportedly training its own model built on open-source foundations, a move that would reduce its reliance on costly third-party models and help cut costs.

Co-founder and CEO Scott Wu, a Harvard graduate, is a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). Co-founder and CTO Steven Hao studied computer science and math at MIT and was a top engineer at Scale AI, while co-founder and CPO Walden Yan is also an IOI gold medalist. All three are competitive-programming veterans, and Cognition’s founding team reportedly held more than 10 combined IOI gold medals.

Valuation Nearly Doubles in Four Months, Revenue Close Behind

Cognition said it raised over $2 billion in a Series E led by new investors Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, with existing investors Founders Fund, General Catalyst and Avenir also participating. The round values the company at $48 billion — nearly double the $26 billion valuation from its Series D just this past May.

The round also drew Benchmark, Bessemer Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Altimeter, Bond Capital, Meritech, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, T. Rowe Price, Lux Capital, 8VC, D1 Capital Partners, 137 Ventures, DST, Positive Sum, HOF Capital, Soma Capital, BOX Group, Battery Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Swish Ventures, Stripes, Definition, Hanabi Capital, Journey, Bain Capital Ventures, Layer Global, A*, Alpha Wave Global, Alkeon Capital, Diffusion, and Nvidia — nearly 40 investors in total.

Cognition said its run-rate revenue has grown from $492 million to almost $900 million since its Series D announcement in May. Customer adoption is expanding across the economy: Nvidia uses Devin for chip design, GE Aerospace for aviation, Citi for financial services, Mercedes-Benz for automotive, and Modal for AI infrastructure. The company has also opened new offices in Washington, D.C., Tokyo, Singapore, London, São Paulo and Madrid, adding to its existing San Francisco, New York and Austin hubs.

On the product side, Cognition introduced Devin Auto-Triage, which takes a first pass at incident investigation; Devin Security Swarm, which finds and triages vulnerabilities; and Devin Automations, which lets teams kick off work directly from events in Slack, GitHub, Linear and other systems without opening a chat.

Growth has come with a cost, though. Cognition leases an Nvidia server cluster costing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and its total cash burn could reach $800 million this year, The Information reported. The same outlet said Cognition is expected to reach $4 billion to $5 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2026.

The Vibe-Coding Field

Vibe coding has become one of the hottest battlegrounds in tech over the past few months. Cursor, which competed directly with Cognition’s Windsurf, was acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion in August — the category’s first mega-exit. That Cognition can still command a $48 billion valuation right after suggests investors see room for multiple large players rather than a winner-take-all market.

Lovable, which differentiates with a no-code builder for non-developers, raised $400 million in August, doubling its valuation to $13.3 billion in eight months. Replit, which lowers the barrier to entry with a browser-based development environment, raised $400 million in March as its valuation tripled in six months. Factory, which targets enterprises with its autonomous coding agent Droids, raised a $150 million Series C in April to reach unicorn status.

Centaur is a term coined by Bessemer Venture Partners for SaaS companies with more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). Where “unicorn” refers to a $1 billion-plus valuation set by investors, “centaur” is a title earned through actual revenue scale.