Cognition, an artificial intelligence lab and software startup, has secured more than $1 billion in funding that values the company at $26 billion. 

The round was led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst and 8VC with participation from existing backers such as Founders Fund, Elad Gil, Alpha Wave, Definition Capital, Positive Sum, Avenir, Vitruvian, Bain Capital Ventures, Conversion Capital, 137 Ventures, Soma Capital and Omri Casspi. 

New investors included Ribbit Capital, Atreides and Layer Global.

Cognition tied the financing to momentum for Devin, which it introduced two years ago as an AI software engineer product. The company said enterprise usage has increased by more than 10 times since the beginning of the year, and it pegged run-rate revenue at $492 million.

Devin is being used by organizations including Citi, Mercedes-Benz, Goldman Sachs, Elevance, Dell, Santander, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Navy. Cognition also listed startups such as Exa, Modal, Eight Sleep, and OpenRouter as its customers.

Cognition described itself as an "agent lab" that works with multiple foundation model providers so customers can choose models based on cost and performance. The company evaluates model behavior across more than 100 software-engineering task categories and designs Devin to help teams manage spending as usage scales.

Cognition said it is moving toward what it called self-driving software development, where engineers spend more time defining problems while agents execute tasks. The company said that internally, 89% of code committed by its engineers is committed by Devin, with the remainder attributed to local agents in Windsurf.

The firm was founded in 2023 by Scott Wu, Steven Hao, and Walden Yan. The San Francisco-based AI lab has grown 50% month-over-month for the last six months. The company closed a $400 million funding round in September, putting the company’s valuation at $10.2 billion, CNBC reported.

Last July, Cognition signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf, after the company lost its CEO and its researchers left to join Google. OpenAI had been in discussions with Windsurf regarding a merger; however, those discussions did not result in a deal.

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