What happened
- Cognition announced on its own blog on September 25 that it crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue. The company was founded in January 2024, and its programming agent, Devin, became available to everyone less than two years ago.
- The post names GE Aerospace, Rivian, Rohlik and Exa among the engineering teams that work with Devin, and gives no further figures.
- The figure that lets you measure the speed is in the Series E announcement of September 8: there the company said its revenue run rate had gone from $492 million in May to almost $900 million, after raising more than $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation.
- That same announcement lists the offices opened in twelve months: Washington, Tokyo, Singapore, London, São Paulo and Madrid, on top of its bases in San Francisco, New York and Austin.
Why it matters
- São Paulo and Madrid aren’t remote sales markets: they’re offices placed where the company says it works side by side with each client. For a development team in Santiago, Bogotá or Lima, that means competition for a custom software contract now includes a vendor with a regional presence and an agent’s price.
- The number that matters isn’t the round milestone, it’s the slope: an additional $400 million in just over four months. A vendor growing like that changes contract terms during the life of the contract.
- An annualized run-rate announcement isn’t an audited financial statement. It’s the company’s own projection from one month of billing, and it should be read as such when it’s used to justify a purchasing decision.
The number
$492 million in May, almost $900 million on September 8, $1 billion on September 25. That’s how Cognition grew over the last few months.
Context
The move resembles that of other vendors that stopped selling licenses to sell measured results, such as Snorkel raising $350 million for selling data rather than software. The variant of placing people inside the client company was already tried by Accenture and Google Cloud with 1,000 forward-deployed engineers.
What’s next
- No timelines announced. The announcement sets no revenue targets or dates for new offices.
Bottom line
In August an advertising holding company cut 8,500 jobs citing AI efficiency, and only one brand agreed to pay for results. Here the company selling the efficiency states the number first and leaves the audit for later.
Sources
- Cognition Crosses $1B in Annualized Revenue Run Rate, Cognition blog, September 25, 2026.
- Do it all with Devin: Announcing our Series E, Cognition blog, September 8, 2026.
Edited by Rodrigo Cornejo. How we select and verify: who writes these notes.
