Cognition, maker of the generative coding assistant Devin, is in talks to raise north of $300 million, valuing the AI startup at $10 billion, according to five people familiar with the deal. Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures are both involved in the deal, the people said.
The deal would more than double Cognition’s valuation, only months after a funding round led by 8VC, the venture firm led by Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, valued the company at $4 billion in March, per Bloomberg. One source cautioned that the terms of the deal could change because it is still being finalized.
The funding round comes after a whirlwind acquisition for Cognition. For months, OpenAI had been rumored to be buying Windsurf, a rival AI coding startup. But in a surprise announcement earlier this month, the startup’s founders announced they were instead joining Google in a $2.4 billion deal. Two days later, Cognition said it was buying the remainder of Windsurf for an undisclosed sum. “The new Cognition will work faster than ever,” CEO Scott Wu said in a video announcing the deal, sitting next to Windsurf’s new CEO Jeff Wang. “We want to redefine how humans and agents work together.”
Cognition, Founders Fund and Khosla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Founded in 2023 by three Olympiad-level gold medalist coders, Cognition launched its AI agent Devin last year to much fanfare. A demo video quickly went viral, but the company also garnered criticism from skeptics worried that the company was overhyping Devin’s capabilities. “Software engineering in the real world is just very messy,” Wu told Forbes last year. Since then, the company has won over corporate customers including expense management company Ramp, data platform MongoDB and fintech Nubank.
Meanwhile, the generative AI coding market has exploded. Rival Anysphere, maker of the wildly popular Cursor tool, has been heralded as one of the fastest growing startups of all time, with annualized revenue now tallying more than $500 million. It was last valued in June at $9.9 billion in a $900 million round led by Thrive Capital. Sweden’s Lovable, another AI “vibe coding” startup that focuses on non-technical people, has reached $100 million in annualized revenue in eight months, beating Cursor to that milestone. At tech giants, CEOs including Google’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella have said more than a quarter of code at their companies are now being written by AI.
Cognition president Russell Kaplan told Forbes last year that the company wants Devin to act like “an army of junior engineers” that could automate coding tasks for enterprise customers. At the time, Wu acknowledged the anxiety it could cause software engineers. “There really is a lot of fear out there,” he said. “People have a lot of questions about what happens in this new paradigm.”
Iain Martin contributed reporting.
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