Cognition Eyes a $25 Billion Valuation, Doubling in Seven Months as the AI Coding Agent Race Reprices
Devin's maker is in talks to raise hundreds of millions at $25 billion just seven months after a $10.2 billion round, putting fresh pressure on a sector already reshaped by the SpaceX-Cursor option and Anthropic-OpenAI competition.
Overview
Cognition AI, the San Francisco startup behind the autonomous software engineering agent Devin, is in early discussions to raise hundreds of millions of dollars at a roughly $25 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported on April 23. The proposed terms would more than double the $10.2 billion valuation Cognition reached in September 2025 — a pace that mirrors a broader repricing of AI coding agents over the past year and lands days after SpaceX preempted Cursor’s own $2 billion round with a $60 billion acquisition option.
What We Know
The potential round is still in early talks and the terms could change, Bloomberg noted, citing people familiar with the matter. SiliconANGLE placed the size of the planned raise at “hundreds of millions of dollars or more.”
The new figure caps a year of unusually steep markups. Cognition was valued at about $4 billion in March 2025 and then at $10.2 billion in September after closing a $400 million round led by Founders Fund, with participation from Lux Capital, 8VC, Elad Gil, Definition Capital and Swish Ventures, TechCrunch reported at the time. Devin’s annual recurring revenue had grown from roughly $1 million in September 2024 to $73 million by June 2025, according to the same TechCrunch account.
The revenue base widened materially with last summer’s acquisition of Windsurf. Cognition picked up Windsurf’s IP, IDE product and remaining staff in July 2025, days after Google executed a $2.4 billion reverse-acquihire of Windsurf’s CEO Varun Mohan and co-founder Douglas Chen, TechCrunch reported at the time. Windsurf was running at $82 million ARR with at least 350 enterprise customers and “hundreds of thousands” of daily active users at the moment of the deal, per the same TechCrunch piece. Since acquiring Windsurf, Cognition’s combined annual recurring revenue has “more than doubled,” CEO Scott Wu told CNBC in September.
The enterprise footprint is now substantial. SiliconANGLE names Dell Technologies and Cisco Systems among Devin’s enterprise customers, and Techzine additionally lists Microsoft. Cognition sells a standard version for individual developers and an enterprise edition that adds customization, security controls and audit logging, according to SiliconANGLE.
What We Don’t Know
Neither Bloomberg’s original report nor secondary coverage discloses who is leading the new round, the exact dollar amount, or the closing timeline. SiliconANGLE and Bloomberg both flag that terms remain in flux. Updated revenue figures for early 2026 have not been published; the most recent public ARR data point — “more than doubled” since the Windsurf deal — comes from CEO Scott Wu’s September 2025 comments to CNBC.
It is also unclear whether the new round, if closed at $25 billion, would include secondary share sales for employees and early backers — a pattern increasingly common in late-stage AI rounds — or be entirely primary capital.
Context
The talks fall against a backdrop of frothy AI coding agent valuations and shifting alliances. SpaceX’s $60 billion option to acquire Cursor preempted that startup’s own $2 billion fundraise just days earlier, while Anthropic and OpenAI continue to push their own coding products and APIs. Investor enthusiasm for AI-generated code has so far rewarded both proprietary frontier model labs and the application-layer companies wrapping those models into developer-facing agents.
For enterprise buyers — the customer base Cognition has emphasized since absorbing Windsurf — the question is less about valuation than about reliability: whether autonomous coding agents can produce production-grade software at the volume their pricing implies. The $25 billion figure assumes the answer is yes, or close to it. Cognition’s revenue trajectory, if independently confirmed, would put the company near the kind of multiples investors are now applying to top-tier AI infrastructure businesses. Whether the round actually closes at the talked-about price, and on what terms, remains the open question.