Cognition raises $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation, nearly doubling it in four months

Cognition, the startup behind the Devin coding assistant, a tool that writes and edits code, has raised $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Avenir. It closed about four months after the company’s previous raise, which valued Cognition at $26 billion.

Cognition said its annualized run-rate revenue, usually defined as one month’s revenue multiplied by 12, has grown from $492 million to $900 million since it announced the earlier round in May. The company did not explain how it calculates the figure. The Information has reported that Cognition is expected to reach $4 billion to $5 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2026.

The willingness of investors to pay a far higher price suggests they believe more than one company can hold a large share of the market for AI coding tools. Andreessen Horowitz, which led this round, also backs Cursor, a rival assistant. Cursor was in talks in April to raise money at a $50 billion valuation, then agreed to sell to SpaceX for $60 billion later that month. Its annualized revenue had passed $2 billion at the time, which means Cognition is now valued at a higher multiple of revenue than Cursor was in the spring.

Cost is the open question. Cognition leases an Nvidia server cluster that costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and The Information reported that this could push the company’s cash burn to $800 million in 2026. Investors familiar with Cursor’s finances said it sold to SpaceX largely because it was severely short of computing power to train and run its models. Whether Cognition will hit the same limit is not known.

Like Cursor before its sale, Cognition is training its own model on top of open source alternatives. Cutting its use of paid models from OpenAI and Anthropic would lower costs and move the company closer to breakeven. Cognition was founded in 2024 by Scott Wu and counts Mercedes-Benz, NASA, Goldman Sachs, and Citi among its enterprise customers.

What to watch is whether Cognition’s run-rate revenue reaches the $4 billion to $5 billion that The Information projects for the end of 2026, and whether the company starts to explain how it calculates that number. The other markers are whether its in-house model reduces its dependence on OpenAI and Anthropic, and whether the cost of the Nvidia cluster pushes Cognition to raise again or look for a buyer, as Cursor did.