Cognition Labs
Cognition is an applied AI lab building autonomous AI software engineers. Their mission is to create a world of software abundance where engineers become architects, solving the most challenging problems and focusing on their craft while AI handles routine engineering tasks.
Founding Story
Founded in November 2023 by three competitive programming prodigies who collectively held multiple IOI gold medals. The founders initially explored cryptocurrency projects in late 2022 before pivoting to generative AI. The team aimed to turn the logic of competitive coding into an AI system. A breakthrough occurred in late 2023 when they realized LLMs combined with reinforcement learning could reason through multi-step tasks. In a pivotal moment before Christmas 2023, their AI agent (Devin) autonomously fixed a server issue by identifying and deleting a faulty system file, proving the concept's viability. The company publicly launched Devin in March 2024.
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Leadership
Founders
Scott Wu
CEO and Co-Founder. Harvard University graduate with BA in Economics. Three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). 2011 Mathcounts national champion. Placed third at Google Code Jam in 2021. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2020. Previously co-founder and CTO of Lunchclub (2017-2022). Worked as software engineer at Addepar before attending Harvard.
Steven Hao
CTO and Co-Founder. Studied computer science and mathematics at MIT (2014-2018). Won gold medal at IOI 2014, placing 6th globally. Previously a top engineer at Scale AI (joined 2018), working on sensor fusion for autonomous vehicles and full product suite. Interned at D.E. Shaw and Dropbox.
Walden Yan
CPO and Co-Founder. Dropped out of Harvard in 2023 to co-found Cognition. Earned gold medal at IOI 2020, placing 19th globally. Previously worked on Cursor at Anysphere (June to August 2023). Co-founder of DeepReason (2022-2023). Served as managing partner at Inverted (acquired in 2021). Thiel Fellow.
Executive Team
Scott Wu
CEO and Co-Founder
Harvard graduate, 3x IOI gold medalist, 2011 Mathcounts champion, Forbes 30 Under 30 2020, previously co-founder/CTO of Lunchclub (2017-2022)
Steven Hao
CTO and Co-Founder
MIT computer science and mathematics graduate (2014-2018), IOI 2014 gold medalist (6th globally), top engineer at Scale AI from 2018
Business Model
Revenue Model
SaaS subscription model with usage-based billing. Revenue is generated through monthly subscription tiers (Core, Team, Enterprise) and usage-based charges measured in Agent Compute Units (ACUs), which represent normalized computing resources including VM time, model inference, and bandwidth. Enterprise customers can purchase Custom Devins (fine-tuned versions) and VPC deployments with custom terms.
Pricing Tiers
Includes autonomous task completion, Devin IDE, Ask Devin, Devin Wiki, Devin API, learning capabilities, unlimited users, up to 10 concurrent sessions, auto-reload settings. ACUs priced at $2.25 each.
Includes everything in Core plus early feature releases, research previews, unlimited concurrent sessions, 250 ACUs monthly (additional ACUs at $2.00 each), and optional onboarding call.
Includes everything in Team plus Devin Enterprise, Custom Devins (fine-tuned versions), Advanced mode (inspecting sessions, creating playbooks, batch sessions), VPC deployment, SAML/OIDC SSO, admin controls, teamspace isolation, dedicated account team, custom terms, and centralized billing.
Target Markets
- Large-scale enterprises
- Financial services and fintech companies
- Banking and payments organizations
- Capital markets firms
- Insurance companies
- Wealth management firms
- Large-scale code migrations and modernization
- Legacy system modernization (COBOL, .NET, PHP)
- Security vulnerability remediation
- Unit test coverage improvement
- QA and regression testing automation
- Repository documentation at scale
- Goldman Sachs
- Citi
- Santander
- Nubank
History & Milestones
Announced strategic partnership with Infosys to scale Devin across global enterprises
Released Devin 2.0 with agent-native IDE, reduced pricing to $20/month starting plan
Scaled to $73 million ARR, 73x growth from September 2024
Acquired Windsurf (agentic IDE) with $82 million ARR and 350+ enterprise customers, combined ARR reached $155 million
Raised $400 million Series C led by Founders Fund at $10.2 billion valuation
3 AI Tools by Cognition Labs
Devin Review
14dAI-powered code review platform that transforms large GitHub PRs into organized diffs with bug detection and codebase-aware explanations.
DeepWiki
5moAI documentation you can talk to for any public GitHub repo—architecture diagrams, source-linked pages, semantic search, and Q&A. Free for public repos; private repo support via Devin.
Devin
7moAutonomous AI software engineer capable of understanding, planning, and executing complete development tasks
