American AI company from San Francisco founded in November 2023 by three IOI gold medalists. Makers of Devin — the first autonomous software engineering agent — and Devin Desktop (formerly Windsurf), an IDE for managing a fleet of agents.
Cognition AI, Inc. (trading as Cognition, also known as Cognition Labs) is an American AI company headquartered in San Francisco. It was founded in November 2023 by Scott Wu (CEO), Steven Hao (CTO) and Walden Yan (CPO). All three are gold medalists of the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). Cognition openly frames its strategy around hiring top-tier competitive programmers — the founding team holds a combined 10 IOI gold medals.
The company rose to prominence in March 2024 with the debut of Devin — an AI agent marketed as the first autonomous software engineer. Devin can plan, write, test and ship code in real repositories on its own, using the same tooling that the customer's engineering team already uses.
In July 2025 Cognition announced its acquisition of Windsurf — the agentic IDE from Codeium — after Google's $2.4B acquihire of Windsurf's CEO and key staff via a technology-licensing deal. Cognition bought the remaining team and product, and by September 2025 the combined company reached a $10B valuation. In June 2026 Cognition rebranded Windsurf to Devin Desktop, integrating it as the central agent-orchestration surface.
Flagship products: Devin (autonomous coding agent available as a cloud service), Devin Desktop (formerly Windsurf — desktop IDE with a fleet of local and cloud agents) and DeepWiki (automatically generated documentation for GitHub repositories).
Founders
Three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). Harvard graduate. Previously worked at Jump Trading.
IOI gold medalist. Previously engineer at Scale AI and Google.
IOI gold medalist. Harvard graduate, Thiel Fellowship recipient.
Classification
