Cognition CEO Scott Wu wants to make 30-35 million software engineers 10 times faster
The Devin maker raised over $1 billion in May at a $26 billion valuation, and its revenue has grown just as quickly
Cognition CEO Scott Wu has a target market most startups would envy: roughly every software engineer on the planet.
Wu says the company wants to boost the productivity of about 30-35 million software engineers worldwide and expand how much software actually gets built. Investors appear to believe him. Cognition raised over $1 billion in May 2026 at a $26 billion valuation.
The money and the math
The May round valued Cognition at $25 billion before the new cash came in. That put the post-money figure at $26 billion.
A Series E round later in 2026 exceeded $2 billion and valued Cognition at $48 billion.
Total funding has now passed $2.5 billion.
The revenue side kept pace. Annualized run-rate revenue rose from $492 million in May 2026 to over $1 billion by September 2026.
What Devin actually does
Cognition’s flagship product is Devin, an AI agent built for autonomous software engineering. The company says its agents can handle every stage of development. That includes planning, writing code, debugging, and deployment.
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Wu’s stated ambition is to make engineers 10 times more efficient through these agents.
Cognition is also its own best test case. The company says 95% of its own code is written by Devin or related tools.
Cognition counts Fortune 500 companies among its enterprise clients, including Mercedes-Benz and Goldman Sachs.
The Mercedes-Benz example is the headline grabber. Devin reportedly shrank an eight-month modernization project for the automaker down to eight days.
Background: a company built by competitive coders
Cognition was founded in late 2023 by Scott Wu and two other co-founders. All three come from the world of competitive programming, each with an extensive record in the International Olympiad in Informatics.
What this means for engineers, enterprises and investors
For engineers themselves, the picture is more nuanced. Wu frames the mission as making developers more productive and increasing how much software gets built, not shrinking the profession.
The optimistic reading is that demand for software is effectively unlimited. Cheaper development would then mean more projects, not fewer people. The skeptical reading is that companies may pocket the efficiency gains through smaller teams.