Last week, Scott Wu walked into a meeting with potential investors and asked them for hundreds of millions of dollars at a $25 billion valuation. The pitch took less than an hour. Bloomberg reported the talks on April 23.

Seven months ago, Cognition was worth $10.2 billion.

That is a 145% jump in valuation while Meta is firing 8,000 people, Microsoft is paying 8,750 of its workers to leave, and the tech sector lost 80,000 jobs in the first quarter alone. Cognition's product, Devin, is sold as the world's first autonomous AI software engineer. Customers point it at a Jira ticket and walk away. It writes the code, runs the tests, and opens the pull request.

The Numbers Are Insane

Devin's annual recurring revenue went from $1 million in September 2024 to $73 million in June 2025. That is a 73x increase in nine months. Then in July 2025 Cognition acquired Windsurf, the AI-native code editor, in a fire-sale deal after Google poached Windsurf's founders for a $2.4 billion licensing fee. Windsurf came with another $82 million in ARR and was doubling its enterprise revenue every quarter.

The combined entity, after that single Windsurf bolt-on, more than doubled total ARR. The customer list reads like a Goldman Sachs cocktail party: Goldman Sachs itself, Citi, Dell, Cisco, Palantir, Ramp, Nubank, and Mercado Libre. These are not lifestyle businesses experimenting with AI. These are banks and infrastructure firms running production engineering work through an autonomous agent.

Cognition was founded in August 2023 by three competitive programmers who won gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics. They built Devin in nine months. Devin has been live in production for less than two years.

What This Valuation Actually Says

$25 billion is more than the market cap of Etsy. More than Snap. More than the entire publicly traded value of Polaris, U.S. Steel, and Foot Locker combined. For an 80-person company that sells one product: an AI that does the job of a junior software engineer.

Investors are not paying for revenue. They are paying for what comes next. If Devin can autonomously close a Jira ticket today, the bet is that next year it closes the ticket plus designs the system plus reviews its own code plus deploys to production. That is the entire job of a senior engineer at a SaaS company. There are roughly 4.4 million software developers in the United States. Their median salary is $132,270. The total addressable market for "replace a human engineer" is somewhere north of half a trillion dollars per year.

Cognition is being valued as if it will capture a meaningful slice of that.

The Uncomfortable Part

The same week Cognition started raising at $25 billion, Microsoft offered buyouts to 7% of its U.S. workforce and Meta confirmed 8,000 layoffs going into effect May 20. Both companies cited "AI efficiency" as the rationale. Both are also investors in or customers of frontier AI labs. The capital that funds Devin's valuation is partially the same capital that funds the layoffs.

Tech executives are no longer hiding the loop. Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in January 2025 that AI would replace mid-level engineers at Meta in 2025. He was a year early. The replacement is happening in 2026, and the public layoff numbers are the proof.

My Opinion

I think Cognition is genuinely a great product and a deserving company at this valuation. I have used Devin. It is not a demo. It opens real PRs that pass real CI on real codebases. The founders are not faking it. That part is real.

What bothers me is the cognitive dissonance in the discourse. The same investors who say "AI will create more jobs than it destroys" are writing $30 million checks into companies whose entire pitch deck is "we replace junior engineers." You cannot hold both positions. Devin works because it does the job. If it does the job, the job goes away. If the job goes away, the person who did the job needs a new job. And nobody, not Cognition, not Meta, not Microsoft, has a credible answer for what that new job is.

The bet on Cognition is the bet that the bottom rung of the engineering career ladder gets sawed off, permanently, within 24 months. If you are a junior dev reading this, $25 billion is the market telling you what it thinks of your future. Take the hint and learn to do something Devin cannot do yet, which mostly means: design systems, talk to customers, and own outcomes. The IDE is not where the value is anymore.

Author: Yahor Kamarou (Mark) / www.humai.blog / 27 Apr 2026