San Francisco-based AI startup Cognition Labs has raised $175 million in a funding round led by Founders Fund, according to a report by The Information. The six-month-old company, which recently launched an AI-powered coding assistant called Devin, is now valued at $2 billion.
With this latest fund, the company is most likely to use it to fuel further development, alongside enhancing its product.
Cognition’s latest funding comes just a month after Founders Fund led the startup’s Series A round at a $350 million valuation. The rapid increase in valuation is in line with the growing interest in AI-powered tools that can assist or even automate software development tasks.
Devin, Cognition’s AI software engineer, was shown to handle entire development projects independently, potentially reducing the need for human developers on certain tasks. The tool’s launch in March went viral on social media, but some users on social media questioned the company’s claims about Devin’s capabilities.
Despite the skepticism surrounding Devin’s launch, the AI coding assistant has shown promising results. According to the SWE-Bench benchmark, which evaluates AI models on software engineering tasks, Devin achieved a 13.86% accuracy in resolving issues unassisted, surpassing the previous best model’s 1.96% unassisted accuracy.
The company, founded in November 2023 by coding wizards, Scott Wu, Walden Yan, and Steven Hao, is one of several players in the growing field of AI-assisted software development. Unlike their competitors, GitHub Copilot, Amazon Code Whisperer or Replit which assist developers by providing code snippets and recommendations, Devin works as an agent and handles the entire projects independently.
The company had previously turned down offers that would have valued it at $1 billion, according to sources familiar with the matter. This trend of AI startups attracting massive investments is evident in other recent funding rounds.
Perplexity, an AI search startup challenging Google Search, also secured funding of $63 million at a billion dollar valuation this week. Similarly, Mistral, a French AI startup founded just over a year ago, reached a $2 billion valuation in December.
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