The AI-coding-agent maker behind Devin and Windsurf — 13x revenue growth in one year.
Updated · Analysis by Trace Cohen · cognition.com
May 2026 raise, $1B+
May 2026 raise, $1B+
May 2026 — up from $37M a year earlier, ~13x
Sept 2025, 2 months post-Windsurf
autonomous agent + AI-native IDE
From $37M to $492M ARR in twelve months — a ~13x jump.
Source: Company reports / Sacra (2025-26)
Set by a $1B+ raise in May 2026 at a roughly $25B pre-money (~$26B post-money) valuation — up from $10.2B just eight months earlier (September 2025), which itself came two months after Cognition acquired Windsurf.
Cognition sells AI coding agents on a subscription and usage basis: Devin is an autonomous software engineer that plans, writes, tests, and ships code with minimal supervision, while Windsurf (acquired July 2025 after OpenAI's $3B bid for it collapsed) is an AI-native IDE with a large bottoms-up developer user base. Pricing spans individual developer plans up through enterprise contracts.
The Windsurf acquisition is what transformed Cognition's revenue mix — it added a large existing subscription base and pulled Cognition from a single agentic product into a two-sided platform that sells both top-down (enterprise engineering orgs standardizing on Devin) and bottom-up (individual developers on Windsurf). That combination is what took ARR from $37M to $492M in twelve months.
Cognition raised at a $10.2B valuation in September 2025 (two months after the Windsurf deal), then raised $1B+ in May 2026 at ~$25B pre-money (~$26B post). Backers reported across rounds include Founders Fund, Lux Capital, 8VC, and Neo.
The largest AI-coding rival — acquired by SpaceX for ~$60B in June 2026.
Microsoft's incumbent AI pair-programmer, largest installed base.
Terminal-native agentic coding tool.
Browser-based AI build-and-deploy agent, competing at the vibe-coding layer.
Cognition is the clearest evidence that in AI coding, distribution beats being first: Devin got the headlines as the 'first AI software engineer,' but it was buying Windsurf's existing developer base that actually multiplied revenue 13x in a year. Going from $10B to $26B in eight months looks aggressive until you remember Cursor just sold to SpaceX for $60B — this whole category is being priced as infrastructure, not tooling. The risk is the same one every AI-coding player faces: model providers themselves (OpenAI, Anthropic) could commoditize the agent layer Cognition is charging a premium for.
Cognition is valued at roughly $25-26 billion after a $1B+ raise in May 2026 — up from $10.2 billion in September 2025, which itself came two months after it acquired Windsurf.
Cognition reached approximately $492 million in ARR by May 2026, up from about $37 million a year earlier — roughly a 13x increase in twelve months.
Yes. Cognition acquired Windsurf's IP, product, brand, and engineering team in July 2025, after OpenAI's $3 billion bid to acquire Windsurf collapsed and Google DeepMind separately struck a licensing deal to hire Windsurf's CEO.
Devin is an autonomous AI software engineer that plans, writes, tests, and ships code with minimal human supervision, sold on subscription and usage-based pricing to individual developers and enterprises.
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Analysis by Trace Cohen · @Trace_Cohen · t@nyvp.com. Figures are as of the update date; verify before relying on them.