Zhidx reported on 9 September that US AI coding unicorn Cognition has closed a Series E above US$2 billion, about RMB 13.4 billion, at a valuation of US$48 billion, about RMB 322.1 billion.
The round was led by new investors a16z and Accel, with existing backers Founders Fund, General Catalyst and Avenir, and other participants including Benchmark, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock, Lightspeed, Altimeter, Bond and Difussion. Since its previous round in May, annualised revenue rose from US$492 million, about RMB 3.3 billion, to nearly US$900 million, about RMB 6 billion, a gain of roughly 83 per cent in four months.
Founders, product and customers
Cognition was founded in 2024, first built in a New York apartment and now headquartered in San Francisco. Its three founders, Scott Wu, Steven Hao and Walden Yan, are all International Olympiad in Informatics gold medallists. Scott Wu attended Harvard for economics before dropping out to co-found the social network Lunchclub; Steven Hao studied computer science and mathematics at MIT and worked at Scale AI; Walden Yan left Harvard to build companies.
Cognition sells AI coding agents and developer tools spanning writing, debugging, testing and delivery. It launched Devin in March 2024 as what it called the world’s first AI software engineer, and acquired Windsurf in May 2025. Before this round it had five public financings; the May Series D topped US$1 billion, about RMB 6.7 billion, at a US$26 billion valuation led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst and 8VC.
Customers include Nvidia, GE Aerospace, Citi, Mercedes-Benz and Modal across chip design, aviation, finance, automotive and AI infrastructure. Recent products are Auto-Triage for automated fault investigation, Devin Desktop and Devin Fusion for cloud-and-editor fusion, and Devin Security Swarm for vulnerability work. Its SWE-1.7 model, built on Kimi K2.7 with reinforcement learning, scores 42.3 per cent on FrontierCode 1.1 Main and 77.8 per cent on SWE-Bench Multilingual.
Cognition has opened offices in Washington, Tokyo, Singapore, London, Sao Paulo and Madrid on top of San Francisco, New York and Austin, and positions itself as an independent agent lab that picks models by task rather than binding customers to one provider.
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Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Zhidx report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.
Translated and adapted from Zhidx (https://www.zhidx.com/p/592179.html).