Cognition Inc., a provider of artificial intelligence programming tools, today announced that it has raised more than $1 billion in funding.

Lux Capital, General Catalyst and 8VC led the Series D round with contributions from more than a dozen others. The deal values Cognition at $26 billion, about $16 billion more than what it was worth in September.

The company disclosed at the time of its previous raise that it annualized recurring revenue stood at $73 million last June. According to Cognition, that number has since grown to $492 million. The company partly credits the jump to a tenfold increase in enterprise usage of its products since the start of the year.

Cognition’s flagship offering is a cloud-based AI agent called Devin. According to the company, it’s capable of automating most programming tasks that a single developer could complete in three hours. It can also take on more complex work if users split the project into sub-tasks. According to Cognition, Devin enabled Mercedes-Benz Group AG to complete a code modernization initiative that would have normally taken eight months in eight days.

One way the service speeds up software projects is by splitting the work among multiple sub-agent. Those agents can generate code in parallel, which is faster than outputting files one after another.

Devin can not only generate code but also perform a range of related tasks. Developers can integrate the agent with observability tools such as Datadog and have it troubleshoot technical issues in their company’s infrastructure. Additionally, Devin lends itself to automating recurring chores. For example, a software team could instruct it to update an application’s documentation every week to reflect recent code changes.

Some of Devin’s features are powered by a custom AI model called SWE 1.6 that Cognition debuted last month. The algorithm is optimized to avoid reasoning loops, unnecessary computations that can slow down code generation. SWE 1.6 further speeds up processing by activating the third party tools it relies on to complete a task all at once instead of one another.

Devin is accessible through Windsurf, a desktop-based code editor that Cognition bought last year. The deal followed a $2.4 billion reversal acquisition through which Google LLC hired several key Windsurf employees. Today, the application has more than 1 million users across more than 4,000 organizations.

Windsurf uses Devin alongside a second AI agent called Cascade. Whereas the former service runs in the cloud, Cascade carries out calculations on developers’ local machines. It’s optimized for simpler tasks such as rewriting individual code snippets to boost their performance.

Cognition faces competition from both tech giants such as Google LLC and fellow startups. One of those startups, Cursor, closed a $2.3 billion funding round last November. More recently, it inked an AI training partnership with SpaceX Corp. that could lead to a $60 billion acquisition. 

The company will use its newly raised capital to broaden the adoption of its products and hire more employees. 

Image: Unsplash