Cognition again reveals fundraising, now targeting $40 billion valuation

Cognition, the company behind the code-writing agent Devin, is in talks with investors for another financing round. The move comes three months after the firm raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation, indicating a particularly active fundraising pace.

Bloomberg reports that the new round hinges on an ambitious revenue goal. Sources at the company say that lifting the valuation to at least $40 billion is contingent on achieving an annual revenue run rate of $1 billion, a marked jump from the figures disclosed in the previous round.

In May, when the earlier round was announced, Scott Wu of Cognition told TechCrunch that the company had reported cumulative annual revenue of $492 million. Wu, described as a programming prodigy, added that organizations using Devin increase their usage by 50 percent each month for six consecutive months. Notable customers include Mercedes-Benz, NASA and Goldman Sachs.

Despite the hype surrounding code agents that could replace programmers, Wu explains that Cognition does not market Devin as a human substitute. In practice, the agent is most often assigned long, repetitive maintenance tasks that developers tend to dislike, such as updating legacy code or migrating applications between infrastructures. This positioning may help explain the rapid adoption among enterprises already working with the tool.