Artificial intelligence coding assistant startup Cognition AI Inc. has reportedly raised nearly $500 million in funding on a $9.8 billion valuation, a month after it entered an agreement to acquire Windsurf Inc.

Though the company hasn’t as yet confirmed the raise, The Wall Street Journal reported today that earlier this week, Cognition filed a document with the State of Delaware noting the issuance of new Series C preferred shares at a price of $55.20 each, compared with $23.10 each for a previous series of shares. Forbes had previously reported in late July that the company was seeking to raise “north of $300 million” on a $10 billion valuation.

Founded in 2023, Cognition specializes in building autonomous AI agents for software development and has as its mission to create AI systems that can operate as fully capable software engineers, moving beyond simple code suggestions to handle the entire development lifecycle. Functionality includes planning tasks, writing and testing code, debugging, deploying solutions and iterating on feedback, all with minimal human intervention.

Cognition’s main product, Devin, differs from traditional coding assistants that simply offer line-by-line suggestions by autonomously managing projects end-to-end within a secure sandbox environment. Devin can understand high-level project requirements, break them down into executable steps, perform research, write and optimize code, run tests and push deployments.

Devin’s stats are also impressive, with the AI coding assistant achieving a 13.8% completion rate on the industry-standard SWE-Bench benchmark, a benchmark that measures an AI’s ability to solve real GitHub issues. Notably, that number is higher than other large language models such as GPT-4 and Claude.

Cognition has also developed an ecosystem around Devin, including MultiDevin, a service that allows a manager AI to coordinate multiple worker AI agents simultaneously, enabling parallel task execution and faster delivery for large, complex projects. The platform offers deployment in secure virtual private cloud environments, ensuring sensitive enterprise data remains protected.

Additional tools include Devin Search for instant, cited codebase queries and Devin Wiki, which auto-generates documentation and architecture diagrams. The features give engineering teams the ability to produce software quickly with transparency and traceability required for enterprise compliance.

With impressive coding abilities, Cognition’s offerings have found a willing audience. Notable customers include Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Ramp Business Corp., Nu Holdings Ltd. and Bilt Rewards Inc.

Coming into its new round, Cognition has previously raised more than $300 million in venture capital funding. The exact amount is not clear, as the amount the company raised in its previous round in March was not disclosed but only reported as being in the “hundreds of millions” on a $4 billion valuation.

Previous investors in Cognition include 8VC Management, Founders Fund Management and Khosla Ventures.

Image: Cognition