Cognition raises $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation
Startup Cognition, the developer of the Devin programming assistant, has raised $2 billion at a company valuation of $48 billion. The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Founders Fund, General Catalyst and Avenir, TechCrunch reports.
This is Cognition’s second fundraising round in four months: during the previous round in May, the startup was valued at $26 billion. The company said its annual revenue run rate increased from $492 million to $900 million. This metric is usually calculated as monthly revenue multiplied by 12, but Cognition did not explain its own calculation methodology.
Comparison with Cursor
Cognition’s valuation implies a higher revenue multiple than that of another developer of the AI coding assistant Cursor before its sale to SpaceX. In April, Cursor was in talks to raise capital at a $50 billion valuation, and later that month agreed to sell to SpaceX for $60 billion. At the time of the talks, its annual revenue run rate exceeded $2 billion.
According to investors familiar with Cursor’s financial performance, the company sold itself to SpaceX largely because of significant computing resource constraints. Whether Cognition will face similar problems remains unclear.
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Computing costs and plans
As The Information reported, Cognition rents a cluster of Nvidia servers that costs hundreds of millions of dollars annually. As a result, the company’s total cash burn this year could reach $800 million.
Like Cursor before its joining SpaceX, Cognition trains its own model based on open-source alternatives. Over time, this could reduce the company’s dependence on expensive OpenAI and Anthropic models and bring it closer to break-even.
The Information expects Cognition to reach an annual revenue run rate of $4 billion to $5 billion by the end of 2026. The startup was founded in 2024 by Scott Wu; its major corporate clients include Mercedes-Benz, NASA, Goldman Sachs and Citi.
