Cognition
Worth-Joining Index · Scorecard
v2.1 ALPHA · 2026-08Career Score
—/100
Coverage
65%
Verified
25%
Stage cohort
Late
Vibe Check
🎪 community voting coming soon
Latest valuation
$26B (Series D, 2026-05)
Traction · Key numbers
Funding
Rounds
2
Valuation pace
$10.2B
$1B+
Funding round · 2026-05 · valuation $26B post (Series D, 2026-05) · led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, 8VC
TechCrunch-reported $25B pre-money round
$400M
Funding round · 2025-09 · valuation $10.2B · led by Founders Fund
With: Lux Capital, 8VC, Elad Gil, Definition Capital, Bain Capital Ventures · Closed two months after the Windsurf acquisition
▸Valuation jumped from $10.2B to $26B in 8 months — this is a Windsurf-acquisition-driven premium, not a pure ARR multiple repricing; whether the next round holds this slope is the thing to watch
▸ARR went from $73M (Jun 2025) to ~$492M (May 2026) — over 6x in under a year, striking growth but still early-base effects, durability unproven
▸Founders Fund, Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC keep doubling down, showing top-tier conviction in the 'AI software engineer' category — but also a herding-risk signal worth flagging
Founders
Scott Wu CEO
IOI gold medalist, co-founder and CEO of Cognition
Steven Hao Co-founder
Co-founder of Cognition
Walden Yan Co-founder
Co-founder of Cognition
Reality · Working here
Signals & Risks
Editorial ✎
Good fit for
· Senior engineers who want to work at the frontier of autonomous coding agents — Devin isn't autocomplete, it's an agent architecture that owns end-to-end tasks
· People with M&A integration experience who can keep engineering culture coherent through rapid expansion — the Windsurf integration is a live, ongoing challenge
· Those comfortable with high valuation and high visibility, willing to work under external scrutiny (benchmarked constantly against Cursor and others)
Not for
· People who want a steady cadence and a predictable roadmap — both valuation and product direction are being pushed hard by the capital narrative
· Those sensitive to post-acquisition attrition — Windsurf's core team was already poached by Google once, and trust-rebuilding is still underway
Ask in the interview
1. How much of the $492M ARR is consolidated Windsurf revenue versus organic Devin growth?
2. What's the actual status of the Windsurf integration, and what's the retention rate of its core technical staff?
3. Facing direct competition from Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and in-house agents from OpenAI/Anthropic, what specifically is Cognition's moat?
Data changelog
Community corrections → editorial review → applied, fully on the record
data as of 2026-05 · Source: Cognition company blog ↗
data as of 2026-05 · Source: Cognition company blog ↗
data as of 2026-05 · Source: Cognition company blog ↗
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