Cognition in Talks at $40B, Three Months After $26B

Cognition, the maker of the autonomous coding agent Devin, is in early talks with investors on a round that would value it at at least $40 billion — a jump of more than 50% from the $26 billion it was worth in May. Bloomberg reported the talks on Wednesday, citing people familiar with them; TechCrunch and others followed. Reports put the raise itself above $1 billion. No investors have been named, and nothing is signed.

The gap between rounds is the striking part. Cognition closed $1 billion at a $26 billion post-money valuation on May 27 — under three months ago — and that round itself came together weeks after the company was first reported to be seeking roughly $25 billion. Before that it was worth $10.2 billion in September 2025. Total capital raised across every round is around $2.5 billion.

What is carrying the price is revenue that has moved just as fast. Cognition's annualized run rate is approaching $1 billion, roughly double the $492 million CEO Scott Wu confirmed at the May financing, with enterprise usage of Devin growing about 50% month over month. That math cuts against the usual read on these numbers: at $26 billion on $492 million, buyers were paying roughly 53 times annualized revenue, while $40 billion against a $1 billion run rate is about 40 times. The valuation is climbing, but the multiple attached to it is actually compressing — investors are paying up for growth that has, so far, arrived.

Devin is sold as an agent that plans, writes, tests and ships production code on its own, and Cognition also owns the Windsurf IDE, which it acquired in July 2025. Wu's pitch has consistently avoided the replacement framing: the agent is aimed at long-tail engineering grunt work — legacy code updates, software modernization, platform migrations — rather than at the work a team's engineers most want to keep. Named customers include Citi, Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, Dell and Santander, along with the US Army and Navy.

The competitive backdrop has consolidated hard around it in a single quarter. Cursor's maker Anysphere was bought by SpaceX in a $60 billion all-stock deal in June, OpenAI acquired Ona to run Codex agents inside customers' own clouds, and Anthropic keeps shipping Claude Code into the same accounts. Cognition is now the largest independent left in the category, which is both the argument for the valuation and the reason it needs capital to stay independent.

Two caveats worth holding onto. Early-stage talks reported through unnamed sources routinely close at different numbers, or not at all — the April report of a $25 billion target landed at $26 billion, so the direction has been right, but the figure moved. And an annualized run rate is a month multiplied by twelve, not a year of collected revenue; at 50% month-over-month growth it is a flattering measure of a business that has yet to prove what its retention looks like once the migrations are finished.