Cognition AI

swyx

@swyx

ok life update: i'll be joining @Cognition! • Cog just went from 0 to $10b in 2 years • Net burn $20m in company history • Avg successful Devin impl sees >5x growth, $1.5m/yr customer expanded >10x in 8 months (not typo) • Windsurf x Cog cross sell going great, looking fwd to cross build. Lighthouse customers in every vertical. • Windsurf's polish + Wave 13/14 are looking v HYPE! more work to do on Windsurf Tab Here's the 5 decision points I had to cross to "buy" Cognition's rise as an Agent Lab that has the potential to be as dominant in the Decade of Agents: • Short Code timelines, Long AGI timelines • The rise of Agent Labs • Owning the Sync/Async spectrum • Start high, go low • Cracked Engineers + Ramped GTM This is probably TMI but I like to record thoughts in public so I can learn when I am wrong, and for others to follow along. Happy reading, in reply tweet. also: Most of @smol_ai capital base is rolling over to Cognition's round today. I'll be returning the rest. AINews and SmolTalk will remain my passion projects. I will continue to operate @aiDotEngineer and @latentspacepod ferociously independent of Cognition. All Cognition competitors were given ample heads up + red carpet to AIE CODE. Ben and I are BEYOND excited to have Lia step up as the new General Manager of AIE!

Digg

@digg

Cognition is acquiring @Interaction, the team behind Poke, bringing a mobile AI agent interface into the Devin company. @cognition gets a phone-native agent surface. People are mostly excited, with one practical worry. Does Poke keep its shape or get folded into Devin? https://t.co/4OF5zSB2RY

Colossus

@colossusmag

Scott Wu is the co-founder of Cognition AI, one of the fastest-growing companies in history. He’s also the greatest competitive programmer the US has ever produced. You may have seen him doing impossible card tricks and mental math. You’ve never seen him asked about weed, Michael Jordan, cancer, and human consciousness over a punnet of strawberries. That is what Colossus editor-in-chief Jeremy Stern did on a recent visit to San Francisco. For those less familiar with @ScottWu46: In 2nd grade, he entered a math competition for 7th graders, lost, and was so furious he still fumes about it 20 years later. The next year he entered the 9th-grade division as a 3rd-grader and got a perfect score. Then he won first place at the US national middle-school math competition and three straight gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, where he became the greatest American gold-medalist and coach in history. Most of the people running the biggest AI companies met as teenagers, competing for their countries on international math and science teams. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Alexandr Wang, to name just a few. Most agree that the von Neumann among them was Scott Wu. In November 2023, a few weeks after his mother died of lung cancer, on the day Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, Wu founded his own AI company: Cognition. He was 26 and saw earlier than almost anyone that AI would converge on agents that work in the background, 24/7, like coworkers. He shipped Cognition’s AI software engineer Devin in March 2024. It worked poorly, and he took intense public criticism for it. Now, in its first 18 months of service, Devin has generated $445 million of revenue run rate and usage has doubled every eight weeks. The US Army, Goldman Sachs, and Mercedes-Benz are all customers. Cognition is raising at a valuation around $25 billion. @JeremySternLA sat down with Wu, the emperor of the nerds, to ask the questions we’d all ask one of the smartest people in America—building the most consequential technology of our generation—if we ever got the chance. As well as MJ and weed, they talk about the cluster of competitive math prodigies behind so much of AI, what makes us human when AGI arrives, and why Wu believes he was put on this earth to teach AI how to code. Read the piece below.

adarsh

@adarsh_exe

Traditional coding benchmarks do not reflect how software is actually built and maintained. That's why we built a new benchmark, APEX-SWE, in partnership with @cognition. It measures whether AI models can perform complex, real-world software engineering work to ship systems that work and debug them when they don't. @OpenAI GPT 5.3 Codex (High) tops the leaderboard at 41.5% on Pass@1.

Dan McAteer

@daniel_mac8

Opus 4.8 more than doubles GPT-5.5's performance on FrontierCode, the new coding benchmark from @cognition. It's ultra-hard coding tasks that would take an experienced human engineer more than a full 40/hr workweek to complete. That, plus Mythos is coming today. GPT-5.6 better be good.

Jared Zoneraich

@imjaredz

Huge update.. I joined @Cognition I’m so incredibly proud of what we built at @PromptLayer. Although it feels a little surreal, I know the team is left in amazing hands. I’ll be staying on as an advisor and can’t wait to see where they take it. We started PromptLayer four years ago, and we practically coined the term “prompt engineering”. ChatGPT had come out weeks prior. Nobody knew exactly how LLMs would evolve, but we did know it will completely change the way we build. We were the first developer platform for this new type of builder. Cognition feels like an extension of this vision. Devin is how this new builder will imagine, invent, and create. We're entering the age of software abundance, to steal a term from @scottwu46 Everything is Coding Agents. It’s the single biggest problem in AI. Cognition is one of the fastest growing companies ever. But I think the team is what really sold it for me- it's packed with so many former founders Excited to share more soon...

Scott Wu

Co-founder & CEO

Three-time IOI gold medalist and Harvard graduate who previously co-founded the AI networking startup Lunchclub before starting Cognition in 2023.

Walden Yan

Co-founder & Chief Product Officer

Harvard-educated IOI 2020 gold medalist who leads product development as Cognition's chief product officer.

Christian W.

VP Central Europe

Previously at Atlan · Frankfurt, Hesse, Germany

Joined May 2026

Nate Mihalovich

Account Director, Majors | Industrials

Previously at Ranger · San Francisco, California, United States

Joined Jun 2026

Paul Phillipson

Account Director, Financial Services

Previously at Databricks · Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Joined Jun 2026

Prasad Pashte

Director of Strategic Partnerships

Previously at MongoDB · New York, New York, United States

Joined Jun 2026