Cognition AI

Cognition AI, Inc. (also known as Cognition Labs), doing business as Cognition, is an artificial intelligence (AI) company headquartered in San Francisco in the US State of California. The company developed Devin AI, an AI software developer.

Background
Cognition was founded in November 2023 by Scott Wu, Walden Yan, and Steven Hao. All three were competitive programmers who won gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI).

Originally the company was focused on cryptocurrency before moving to AI as it became a trend in Silicon Valley following the release of ChatGPT.

In March 2024, Cognition released a demo of its AI coding tool, Devin AI which was said to be able to perform the tasks of a software engineer.

Cognition boasted that its 10-person team as of March 2024 has won a total of 10 IOI gold medals. Apart from its founders, other members of the team who are gold medalists include Wu's brother Neal and Andrew He. Wu stated this background gives Cognition an edge in AI competition as teaching an AI to be a programmer is a very deep algorithmic problem that requires the system to make complex decisions.

With regards to fundraising, the company was backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund which provided $21 million of funding to it in early 2024 valuing the company at $350 million. In April 2024, Founders Fund led a $175 million investment into Cognition valuing the company at $2 billion making it a Unicorn.

In May 2024, it was announced that Cognition partnered with Microsoft to integrate Devin AI and would be powered Microsoft Azure. It received a mixed reaction from users online as while Devin AI was considered promising, there were concerns about job displacement as well as the actual capability of Devin AI.