Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash 

According to a recent report, the global agentic AI in Enterprise IT is projected to grow 46% annually over the next ten years to reach $182.9 billion by 2034 from $4.1 billion in 2024. The technology is expected to have a big impact across multiple use cases and is already significantly impacting the software development life cycle through its ability to code and test during the development process. San Francisco-based Cognition AI is known for its pioneering AI coder Devin.

Cognition AI’s Offerings

Cognition was founded in 2023 by International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) gold medalists Scott Wu, Steven Hao, and Walden Yan. Initially they wanted to focus on crypto, but they soon pivoted to an applied AI lab. The founders wanted to build an AI engine that would use deep algorithmic process to be taught to solve problems and make complex decisions. Within a few months, they had launched Devin, the “first AI software engineer”.

Devin thinks and works like other software engineers. It “can plan and execute complex engineering tasks requiring thousands of decisions”. When given a problem statement, Devin can create a plan of action, identify API documentation needed, write code, run code, and even de-bug it. Because Devin can recall context and learn over time, it learns from its own mistakes and can keep editing the code till it solves the problem at hand.

Devin comes equipped with developer tools including the shell, code editor, and browser that are needed by any coder. At launch in March 2024, Devin was evaluated on SWE-bench, a benchmark that asks agents to resolve real-world GitHub issues found in open-source projects. Devin correctly resolved 13.86% of the issues end-to-end, compared to the previously set benchmark of 1.96%. Cognition even boasted that Devin could land gig-jobs at Upwork to handle some routine assignments.

Cognition AI’s Financials

Cognition remains privately held and does not disclose financials. Reports suggest that it is not yet generating meaningful revenues as it earns revenues by charging users $500 a month for access to Devin.

Despite that, Cognition’s valuations have soared. It has raised $187 million from Peter Thiel-founded Founders Fund and other tech luminaries including Patrick and John Collison, Elad Gil, and Chris Re. It had raised $21 million in a series A round at $350 million valuation. The company raised another $175 million at a valuation of $2 billion in April 2024.

Cognition is not the only player in the market space. Tech giants like Microsoft’s GitHub, Google, Amazon along with niche players like Magic, Tabnine, and Codeium are all working to build their version of AI-assisted coding tools. Most of these are yet to come out with a tool that is not only great but can also help recover the high costs associated with developing these products. Initial hype now over, there has been mixed reaction on Devin’s capabilities with some users claiming that it either cannot do the assigned tasks, or takes too long to do them. But Devin is just the beginning of other possibilities.

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