The Idea: Scott Wu was an unlikely candidate to start the most-talked-about AI company of 2024. A three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics, widely regarded as the strongest competitive programmer in U.S. history, he'd already spent five years building Lunchclub, an AI-powered networking startup that hit a $100M valuation. But in late 2023, after losing his mother to cancer in Louisiana, Wu flew to New York to brainstorm with old friends. On the afternoon of November 17, 2023, news broke that Sam Altman had been fired from OpenAI's board. Wu cancelled his Thanksgiving plans, flew to the Bay Area, and within weeks had assembled a tiny team of fellow IOI champions in a New York apartment. Their bet was that the next leap in software wasn't going to be a copilot helping engineers - it was going to be an agent that could do the whole job itself. This was the beginning of Cognition.

The Execution:

• November 2023: Scott Wu, Steven Hao, and Walden Yan - three IOI gold medalists - founded Cognition in a small New York apartment to build the world's first fully autonomous AI software engineer.
• March 2024: Cognition publicly launched Devin, scoring 13.9% on SWE-Bench - far ahead of GPT-4's 1.7% and Claude 2's 4.8%. The internet roasted the launch demo. Wu shipped through it.
• September 2024: Devin hit $1M ARR - just six months after launch, with the company still small enough to fit in a single open-plan office.
• June 2025: ARR scaled to $73M as Devin became the agent of choice for enterprises including the US Army, Goldman Sachs, and Mercedes-Benz.
• July 2025: Cognition acquired Windsurf in a whirlwind weekend deal - after Google's $2.4B reverse-acquihire of Windsurf's founders left the rest of the team stranded. The acquisition brought in $82M ARR, 350+ enterprise customers, and one of the strongest GTM teams in the industry.
• September 2025: Closed a $400M funding round at a $10.2B valuation led by Founders Fund. Total cash burn across the entire company history: under $20M.
• May 2026: Hit a $445M run rate with usage doubling every 8 weeks. Devin now sits at ~90% on SWE-Bench and 80% on SWE-Bench Pro. Cognition is currently raising at a ~$25B valuation.

The lesson? Ship early, eat criticism, then compound. Cognition's March 2024 launch was a 13% SWE-Bench score and the internet wrote them off as vapourware. Two years later they're at 90%, $445M ARR, and absorbing competitors. The competitive-programmer DNA wasn't just optics - it was the engine that let a tiny team out-iterate every well-funded rival in the category.