Interview
Inside the Fastest-Growing Category in AI: Scott Wu, CEO of $26B Cognition
- Cognition has raised over $2.5 billion to date, reaching a last valuation of $26 billion.
- The company generated $500 million in revenue in less than three years.
- Customer usage for Cognition's AI engineer, Devon, has grown 11x to 12x in the last six months.
- Over 95% of Devon's own codebase was written by Devon, with the number of shipped code blocks increasing 7x in the last six months alone.
- Cognition's customer base includes Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, Citi, Dell, Santander, NASA, the US Navy, and the US Army.
- Cognition acquired the Windsurf IDE team within a weekend in late 2023 to integrate their local IDE capabilities with Cognition's cloud-based agent infrastructure.
- The Windsurf acquisition merged a 200-person go-to-market and engineering team with Cognition's 35-to-40 person team.
- The combined entity operates as a single product where users can hand off sessions between the local Windsurf environment and the remote Devon Cloud agent.
- Cognition remains an independent company, refusing to merge with model labs or become a subsidiary of a larger tech conglomerate.
- The company maintains model neutrality, integrating capabilities from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google rather than relying on a single provider.
- Cognition has engaged with US government agencies in Washington D.C. to address software modernization in sectors like the DMV and healthcare.
- Founder Scott Wu rejects the "singularity" narrative predicting human obsolescence in six months, citing practical hurdles in hardware availability, organizational processes, and the ambiguity of long-term strategic problems.
- Wu distinguishes between benchmark-solvable tasks and real-world problems that lack clear success metrics or require long-term outcome verification.
- The company views the immediate future not as efficiency gains, but as an "abundance era" where AI enables the mass creation of software, including "single-use software" tailored to specific user needs.
- In 2023, the team used an early version of Devon to automatically resolve a persistent MongoDB database setup error that a human engineer could not fix.
- Scott Wu declined Peter Thiel's proposal to settle seed round term sheet negotiations via a poker match, opting instead for direct negotiation.
- Cognition is currently preparing for a stage presentation at the RAISE AI summit in Paris.
- The company projects that by 2031, the current shift will be viewed as the moment software began to drive itself entirely.