This profile interviews Cognition AI co-founder Scott Wu, exploring his background as a competitive programming prodigy and the rapid commercial success of his AI coding agent Devin, which has reached a $445 million revenue run rate and a $25 billion valuation.
Scott Wu is the co-founder of Cognition AI, one of the fastest-growing companies in history. He’s also the greatest competitive programmer the US has ever produced. You may have seen him doing impossible card tricks and mental math. You’ve never seen him asked about weed, Michael Jordan, cancer, and human consciousness over a punnet of strawberries. That is what Colossus editor-in-chief Jeremy Stern did on a recent visit to San Francisco. For those less familiar with @ScottWu46: In 2nd grade, he entered a math competition for 7th graders, lost, and was so furious he still fumes about it 20 years later. The next year he entered the 9th-grade division as a 3rd-grader and got a perfect score. Then he won first place at the US national middle-school math competition and three straight gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, where he became the greatest American gold-medalist and coach in history. Most of the people running the biggest AI companies met as teenagers, competing for their countries on international math and science teams. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Alexandr Wang, to name just a few. Most agree that the von Neumann among them was Scott Wu. In November 2023, a few weeks after his mother died of lung cancer, on the day Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, Wu founded his own AI company: Cognition. He was 26 and saw earlier than almost anyone that AI would converge on agents that work in the background, 24/7, like coworkers. He shipped Cognition’s AI software engineer Devin in March 2024. It worked poorly, and he took intense public criticism for it. Now, in its first 18 months of service, Devin has generated $445 million of revenue run rate and usage has doubled every eight weeks. The US Army, Goldman Sachs, and Mercedes-Benz are all customers. Cognition is raising at a valuation around $25 billion. @JeremySternLA sat down with Wu, the emperor of the nerds, to ask the questions we’d all ask one of the smartest people in America—building the most consequential technology of our generation—if we ever got the chance. As well as MJ and weed, they talk about the cluster of competitive math prodigies behind so much of AI, what makes us human when AGI arrives, and why Wu believes he was put on this earth to teach AI how to code. Read the piece below.
Scott Wu, CEO of Cognition, discusses Devin, an AI software engineer built on Claude, aiming to accelerate software development by 10x for engineering teams.
Cognition CEO Scott Wu discusses that AI coding agents like Devin are designed to assist, not replace, human programmers, emphasizing human-AI collaboration over job displacement.
Devin, the autonomous coding agent from Cognition, has grown from $1M to $445M ARR in months, doubling usage every eight weeks and serving major enterprises including the US Army and Goldman Sachs. Cognition is raising at a $25B valuation and recently acquired Windsurf, with Google having paid $2.4B to license Windsurf's founders.
A tweet highlights a 40-minute masterclass by the founder of a $20B Chinese AI company, explaining Agent Swarms and AI systems at scale, with the implication that the architecture beats Anthropic's Claude.