Claude Code and Codex are hogging all the headlines around AI coding, but another AI coding firm has managed to raise a massive new round.
Cognition, the company behind autonomous AI software engineer Devin, has raised over $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation. The round was led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC. The raise more than doubles Cognition’s previous $10.2 billion valuation, set just months ago in a $400 million round led by Founders Fund.
The numbers behind the raise are striking. Cognition says its enterprise usage has grown more than 10x since the start of the year, with run-rate revenue reaching $492 million. That’s a dramatic leap for a company whose Devin product sat at just $1 million in annualized recurring revenue back in September 2024.
From Niche to Enterprise Staple
When Cognition launched Devin two years ago, cloud-based coding agents were largely a curiosity. Today, the company counts Citi, Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, Elevance, Dell, Santander, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Navy among its enterprise customers. Fast-growing startups like Exa, Modal, Eight Sleep, and OpenRouter have also adopted Devin to automate meaningful parts of their software development lifecycle.
That enterprise pull was accelerated by Cognition’s acquisition of Windsurf last July, after Windsurf’s near-deal with Google fell apart. The acquisition brought in a large enterprise customer base with less than 5% overlap with Cognition’s existing clients, and combined enterprise ARR rose over 30% in the seven weeks post-close.
Independence as a Strategy
Cognition is positioning itself explicitly as an independent agent lab — a deliberate choice as model costs and vendor lock-in become boardroom concerns. The company says it evaluates model performance across more than 100 categories of software engineering tasks, and has built Devin to automatically route tasks to the right model for the best price-performance ratio. As token usage scales across the industry, that kind of model-agnostic architecture becomes a competitive differentiator.
Building Its Own Models Too
Cognition isn’t just an agent layer on top of other companies’ models. The company recently launched SWE-1.6, a coding model that has become the most-used model inside Windsurf. The model runs at up to 950 tokens per second and has been well-received for both speed and cost efficiency.
Devin Eating Its Own Cooking
Perhaps the most telling metric in Cognition’s announcement: Devin is now responsible for 89% of pull requests written at Cognition itself. That’s up sharply from the roughly 25% figure CEO Scott Wu cited in early 2025, when he predicted the number would cross 50% by year-end. Features like Devin Review, Auto-Triage, and Managed and Scheduled Devins were all shipped with significant assistance from Devin itself.
Cognition’s trajectory — from a 10-person stealth startup founded by competitive programming medalists to a $26 billion enterprise AI company in just over two years — is one of the fastest ascents in recent venture history. The question now is whether Devin can hold its ground as every major AI lab, including Anthropic with Claude Code and OpenAI with Codex, races to own the agentic coding market.