AI Startup Cognition Raises $1 Billion at $26 Billion Value

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Cognition has raised over $1,000,000,000 at a $26,000,000,000 valuation. Lux Capital, general catalyst, and eight VC led the new round. Cognition CEO Scott Bostick is here to discuss the news. We'll also give an update on the company's AI coding agent, Devin. Not just one agent. Like, I think Caroline made a good point. Like, it's an army of agents, and we'll get to that. Start with some basics, Scott. A billion dollars, big valuation. Why'd you do that?

[00:00:25]Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, look. Thank thank you so much for having me back. Look. A few different reasons. First of all, you know, the growth that we've seen in the business has been incredible. And and I think really across the board, what we're seeing is that AI is doing real work at real companies everywhere. And, you know, every company in 2026 is a software company. And so we work with, for example, all the top top five health insurers in The United States. We're seeing folks building way more tooling for for all of their care providers. They're able to to to cut down on price and cover more people. We're working with banks on on delivering software and making sure to to to to give their customers access to what they need. Right? We're seeing this with with with the treasury and NASA as well. And so a couple reasons for the raise. I think, first of all, we wanna continue to grow aggressively, and this really allows us to do that.

[00:01:08]It allows us to scale our compute. It allows us to to grow the team and so on. Second of all, it allows us to stay independent and and to to really continue on as an independent business, which is really, really important for us.

[00:01:19]It's going well as an independent business. Like, what's what's interesting talking to you over, let's say, in aggregate over a period of a year is to track growth.

[00:01:27]Yeah.

[00:01:27]Right? So when you first started coming on the show, like, beginning of twenty five, twenty four, the revenue run rate was a few million with respect. Then exactly a year ago, you're kind of in a run rate of about $37,000,000. Where's your revenue run rate now?

[00:01:41]Yeah. So we're getting close to 500,000,000 today. Wow. As you said, we've only been in business for about two years, and I I think a lot of what it speaks to is just how much demand there is out there for for all of this. And, you know, there's about $3,035,000,000 software engineers in the world today. We wanna make all of them 10 times more efficient, and then we think there is a lot more than 10 times more software to build.

[00:01:59]There is so much demand, Scott, but there's also a pretty crowded market when it thinks of startups. And, admittedly, you've been talking about how labs are sort of buying these startups, and we think about what has just been doing over with SpaceX. But I'm interested as to how you see the threat from the big labs in and of themselves.

[00:02:17]Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. For us, it's actually the other way around. Like, I I I think for us, it's, you know, being fully independent and fully neutral is actually the best way for us to be aligned with our customers. And so we work very closely with all these labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, but also Google, x AI, and so on. We have deep relationships with them. We work with them on research, and it allows us to work with our customers and provide them the best model for every different use case. And so Devon is a compound system that works with all of these different models. And because of that, we're able to to to to to be the Switzerland in in the equation here.

[00:02:48]A Switzerland that sometimes makes the most of the disruption when it comes to talent and the like. I think about what happened last year, the windsurf assets, the IP, the brand, the employees after Google took well, the key CEO and leadership of that company. Will more in a M and A happen? Is that where some of the new funding will come into perspective?

[00:03:09]I'm sure there will be more, and, you know, there there will be different things that come up. It's it's for for us, you know, what what we're personally most focused on is just continuing to grow the business and and and serve customers as best as we can.

[00:03:20]You said, well, heavy emphasis on independence. Yeah. And then you called yourselves the Switzerland of this space.

[00:03:26]Yes.

[00:03:27]You know, what do you think will happen if SpaceX does acquire Cursor is the base question. But when I speak to, say, the engineering teams at NVIDIA, the reason they like Cursor was the freedom to swap in and out the underlying model depending on what your your coding objective was. I I I suppose that's one reason why they like Devon. Right?

[00:03:47]But if Cursor becomes a part of SpaceX AI, you know, how do you see that changing the field? Data is so critically important, right, and and who you are beholden to.

[00:03:58]Yeah. Absolutely. No. I mean, it's it's a great question. I think in practice, I think there are lot of great teams working on code, including, of course, the labs themselves. I I think what we see is that the ecosystem is is is is broad enough and vibrant enough that it makes sense for there to be different players in different positions. And so there are going to continue to be a first party products from, the labs themselves.

[00:04:18]But as we're kind of saying, you know, to your point, I think having the ability to serve each of the different models and and not just the ability, but also the neutrality in terms of being incentivized to just serve whatever is the best model for each case rather than a single, you know, a a single series of models, I think, is is is an important position in the space as well.

[00:04:34]You would say that Devon is the first AI software engineer. Yeah. And we talked about the revenue run rate. Clearly, that's evidence of momentum and success. But are you able to sort of give any data on how pervasive Devon is, how it has changed the structure of different engineering orgs at at software companies, at other technology companies?

[00:04:56]For sure. Yeah. I mean, we're we're seeing this across the board where as teams are adopting Devon and coding agents on on mass that that in in in practice, they're able to do much more and execute much more aggressively on road map.

[00:05:08]Is this new code, or is it going back over old code bases? It's it's both.

[00:05:12]And so as you can imagine, the the large majority of work is is working on these existing code bases and and continuing to build and add new features and and so on. But even internally at Cognition, for example, more than 90% of the code that we write is written by Devon. And so, of course, we're using Devon all day when we're going and building Devon itself.

[00:05:28]And even with that productivity, you've been scaling the amount of people you hire, Scott. Just reflect on what this means in terms of how many software engineers we're gonna need. Like, this ongoing anxiety is the disruption that AI causes in all its ways and across all these industries.

[00:05:46]Yeah. No. I I I think what we'll see is, of course, the job will evolve over time, and we'll see some of the skill sets change, but I think we will have far more people doing in this and building software and building products, not less. And, you know, my my favorite side on this personally is today, there's about 30 or 35,000,000 software engineers in the world. Just twenty, twenty five years ago at the start of the century, it was under 1,000,000. And that's clearly come with with a massive rise in in in the amount of software that we've produced. And I I think as we continue to make it more and more efficient, we're actually just gonna produce even more software, not less.

[00:06:15]Scott, very, very quick. What's the goal you've set the team for the balance of the year, one metric?

[00:06:20]Yeah. Yeah. Look. I I think I think for this year, we we, firmly intend to cross a billion in revenue run rate. We wanna keep going further even beyond that. And and and from there, we just wanna to grow to as many of the the companies in the world that we can.