Inside the Fastest-Growing Category in AI: Scott Wu, CEO of $26B Cognition

Cognition has raised over a billion dollars. First AI software engineer, Devin. Microsoft and Cognition, Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, Citi, Dell, Sandia, NASA, the US Navy, and the US Army. We've raised over 2.5 billion to date at a last valuation of 26 billion. In less than 3 years, you got to 500 million in revenue. That's crazy. Half a billion in revenue in less than 3 years. Our customers in the last 6 months or so have also grown their usage something in the range of like 11 to 12x. Once you've solved AGI, you just take over the entire world and then there's just one entity that rules the world. I just don't think that's the right future for us. There is nothing that humans do that AIs can't do. Maybe you can just have like an AI engineer buddy that can just do work for you. But that was like the very first moment that we believed it was possible. I think the abundance era is real and I think we'll be soon.

Yeah, great to be here.

Um, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like I'll be in the elevator in my building and like I'll just come down and people be like, "Are you Devin?" And then, you know, like, well, I'm actually not Devin, but yes, I understand what you're asking me.

Yeah. Yeah, I'll be on stage tomorrow. I just landed an hour ago. Came straight here.

I did actually. Yeah. I mean, I can't even keep up with it at this point. So, no, things have been going like crazy. I mean, even for us internally, like one of the craziest things is obviously we use a ton of Devin to build Devin. In fact, we almost exclusively use Devin to build Devin at this point. Like 95% of the code or something is written by Devin. But the crazy thing is even in the last six months, you know, if you ask people, oh, like AI coding, yeah, it's been going on for, you know, three, four years now, which is true, it has been, but even in the last six months, I think the number for us was like our total amount of code shipped is roughly 7xed in that time. And so it's like the number of PRs we've shipped, the amount of code. And obviously literal output, you know, like that there's different ways in terms of how you actually measure the productivity that you get out of it. But I think in practice like we're just able to do so much more and get so much more leverage in even this period of time. Like the models just keep getting better. I think there's more and more that's been kind of fleshed out, I would say, with the product experience. And so yeah, no, things are flying. It's crazy.

Yeah, it's a great question. So a couple things I'd say on this. First of all, I think obviously literal tokens is just not the right answer really. I mean, lots of people talked about that, you know, I think the token, you know, I say the token max era, you know, lasted from January to May of 2026, roughly.

Um, yeah, RIP, you know, it was a fun time. But no, I mean I think we're now at this point where obviously what you care about is outcomes and like what you're actually delivering. And so you know we see how much we're shipping. We're seeing how much we're doing. Obviously what do we care about is like you know what are we getting to with the product? Like what are we actually delivering to our customers and our users and I think that's roughly the same for every business. There's no kind of like secret trick or there's no kind of like easy way out in terms of measuring actual ROI, productivity and so on, but a lot of it comes down to just actually looking to each of the outcomes that you're driving. And so for us it's you know obviously we have all the KPIs of the business that we track and that we kind of follow. And you know, when we think about our output, like a lot of what we think about is obviously it's like, you know, how quickly are we growing those numbers? As opposed to anything that we actually look at in terms of tokens or spend or something like that.

It's a good question. So, what I always think about with this is I think on the one hand, I think relative to businesses and by the way, it's not just us. It's like our customers have seen this where similarly our customers in the last six months or so have also grown their usage in something in the range of like 11 to 12x of Devin. And the way I'd say it is yeah on the one hand I think you just like think about businesses of the past you think about the growth of all these tech companies in history and obviously it's pretty crazy. On the other hand you know when I kind of asked the first principles question Okay, how many people are using coding agents now? How much are they using it for? How much are they getting out of it? Versus like what do we think they're going to be using and how much of it are they going to be using in, you know, three years or something. I think the rough answer, especially if you look, you know, if we rewind a bit like a year ago, the rough answer a year ago was roughly zero. And the rough answer for you know two three years from now is roughly every software engineer in the world and probably a lot more than all just the software engineers because I think a lot more people will be able to produce code and produce products and so on right. And so then when you take those two points on the curve and you just extrapolate out what has to happen you know it's I think there has to be massive adoption massive growth. I think what that looks like in practice often is like of course you know there's the virality itself there's like you know there's a ton of great content that I think a lot of different folks are putting out in terms of like educating people and showing people how to use the tools effectively and then there's you know real organizational change that has to happen all these companies to make that happen but it's insane like of all the categories there was an interview I did way back when with Naveen from Mayfield and he laid out the three fastest growing categories and I know it's like it's really obviously it's quite easy to kind of forget about these things when you're in and like when the whole market is moving with it. But it's insane how fast this new category in less than 3 years you got to 500 million in revenue. That's crazy. Half a billion in revenue in less than 3 years.

Yeah. I know it's I mean it's I think we're very fortunate and I think that the like obviously I mean AI as a whole has moved like crazy in the last few years, but like the way that we think about it is like we have to move this fast, you know? It's like if frankly if we only 3xed year-over-year or whatever it is, you know, we'd be lagging the market, right, in terms of how fast all this adoption is happening. And I think it's I would say it's more a reflection of just how meaningful the technology is. You know, it's like everybody in enterprise or you know, just building products in general, like the hardest part about building a product, selling a product, all that is just like explaining to people why they should care. You know, it's like, hey, I've got this like, you know, payroll optimization thing. I've got this usage based billing thing. I've got this whatever, but like here's why this is like, you know, really meaningful and here's why you should be thinking about this, right? The nice thing about this with, you know, AI that can write code by itself and build self-driving products for you is, you know, it's I think it's kind of obvious why you should care, right? And so a lot of it is just like figuring out how you solve all the practical problems of like getting the technology there and then getting it out to people.

Yeah, it's a fun time. I mean it was all of 11 months ago. But so we and by the way it's quite topical because I think recently you know there's similar news with Cursor. You know we at the time you kind of heard this news roughly around the same time as everyone else that hey this company Windsurf which is building a really great IDE that a lot of folks used individuals companies and so on. Some of the team was going to Google, right? And so there was kind of like a acqui-hire deal almost where a number of the researchers on that team were going to Google, right? And there was a company kind of behind that you know that still had all the customers that still had a ready to go go-to-market team a lot of the platform engineering the product itself you know all the details there. But obviously it kind of like you know was trying to figure out what to do and that was announced that Friday afternoon and you know we at Cognition we were talking about that internally we're kind of joking about at first like kind of interesting like is there and then you know as we actually thought about it seriously more we were like actually this is really interesting for us because you know if you think about where we're at like you know we've always been focused on obviously you know the research the product itself like really making progress with the agent product. I think as time goes on, it's become more and more clear that like the really good coding IDE products, you know, the tool that you're kind of like sitting in and using to look at the code itself versus the agent product which is kind of that almost the engineer that you can delegate. You obviously want those to be very hand-in-hand like a lot of the same information on like understanding your exact codebase. You know, obviously like you want the same knowledge to persist across a lot of like how you even go and do your work and manage sessions is very common. You know, you're looking at the code yourself and then you figure out there's something you want to go do and so you hand that off to like a remote agent, right? And so ton of synergies in the product. Similarly in terms of go-to-market like you know Windsurf had amazing enterprise traction already had a team that was really you know had a lot of expertise in going and selling to these folks and kind of like figuring out how to actually you know deliver and so like a really really amazing deployed engineering motion all the pieces that you would need basically. And so we got in touch with the Windsurf team that evening. So it was Friday evening and then basically over the course of that weekend we worked out the entire acquisition together. So by Monday morning we had the announcement ready to go. Fun announcement both myself and Jeff and honestly our entire team you know we all got very little sleep that weekend. But you know we put everything together and yeah know it's great that we were able to do that. I mean I think it made a lot of sense for us as a company. I think it was also obviously like a really great team that was just kind of figuring out what to do. And I think over the last like year, you know, there's I remember saying it's like peanut butter and chocolate honestly for us. Like it's been a lot of fun. And at this point it's like I think the first few months a lot of little details as you can imagine to figure out like some of the same customers or companies, you know, it's like yeah, we had somebody on the Cognition side who had a relationship with them. We had somebody on the Windsurf side who had a relationship. There's tons of stuff to figure out, right? All the product stuff, you know, it's like we're talking at the high level about what the synergies are. Ton of detail involved in actually going and plugging that in and making billing work and thinking about how you actually hand a session off from the local environment to the remote environment and all these other things. And then similarly even like the teams, the offices, all of that, you know, stuff to figure out. But today I would say it's like it's all one product. It's all one kind of clean you know you come to see our office and it's like you wouldn't know at all like okay is this person from the old Cognition or the old Windsurf or did they join after you know that time and it's kind of like it's been really nice in that time.

Yeah. No, that was a real process. And by the way, one of the things that was tricky about that process is Cognition at the time was all of 35 or 40 people. And we had a meaningful business with, you know, real traction. We were doing in the range of 70 or 80 million of revenue run rate at the time. But it was a very small team. Windsurf on the other hand because it had kind of like scaled out go-to-market and set all that up is around 200 people at the time and so a lot of details to figure out obviously and so for a few months I mean the immediate day of or week of all of us were just like okay let's just like right the ship you know let's make sure folks know you know customers know that we're going to be there for them we're going to be shipping we're going to be like you know taking care of both sides of the product and doing that well right and let's just go and ever. Over the first few months, obviously, a lot of it was just like figuring out how we kind of get into a good state. And then, you know, as with all things, it's kind of like it's much easier to go build these things and do all this, you know, with some time. And so, you know, we had a lot of little like kind of like fun offsites, which helped, I think, for people getting to know each other. Ton of strategy sessions obviously like working out all the details and so on. And then you know pretty soon like at end of last year we got to kind of like a we were looking for like a bigger SF office space obviously like as soon as possible just as like a tactical matter because you know we needed an office that could fit everybody right. And so like by the end of the last year we got that office space and then kind of were able to put everyone in one space and all kind of like work together and those were I would say kind of the big milestones that like made things super super smooth.