Cognition raises $2B at $48B valuation as revenue nearly doubles

Cognition's annualized revenue jumped from $492 million in May to $900 million by September, and investors just rewarded that trajectory with a valuation almost double what the company was worth four months ago. The Devin AI coding startup closed a $2 billion Series E at a $48 billion valuation, up from $26 billion in its previous round.

Andreessen Horowitz and Accel led the raise, with Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Avenir also participating. The pace of the markup is notable even by AI startup standards: Cognition's valuation has nearly doubled since May, tracking the near-doubling of its revenue over the same stretch.

Founded in 2024 by Scott Wu, Cognition has built a customer base that now includes Mercedes-Benz, NASA, Goldman Sachs, and Citi, a roster that points to real enterprise adoption of AI coding agents rather than just developer-tool experimentation. The company projects annualized revenue of $4 billion to $5 billion by the end of 2026, a target that would require growth to accelerate further from its current run rate.

The cost of staying independent

That growth isn't cheap. Cognition leases an Nvidia server cluster costing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and total cash burn could hit $800 million in 2026. Much of that infrastructure spend supports an effort to train its own model built on open-source foundations, aimed at cutting dependence on third-party models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

Owning more of its model stack gives Cognition control over cost and latency as it scales agentic coding products, but it also means shouldering compute expenses that most application-layer startups avoid by renting inference from foundation model labs. The bet is that deeper vertical integration pays off in margin and differentiation once usage reaches sufficient scale.

The size of this round, and the valuation behind it, suggests investors don't see AI coding settling into a single dominant winner anytime soon. With Cognition, Cursor, and other coding-agent startups all raising at steep valuations in the same window, backers appear to be pricing in a market with room for several large players rather than one that consolidates quickly around a single tool.