Inside the Fastest-Growing Category in AI: Scott Wu, CEO of $26B Cognition

**Scott Wu** (0:00)
Cognition has raised over a billion dollars. First AI software engineer, Devin.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:05)
Microsoft and Cognition.

**Scott Wu** (0:06)
Cognition and Mercedes-Benz.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:08)
Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, Citi, Dell, Santander, NASA, the US. Navy and the US. Army. They've raised over 2.5 billion today at a last valuation of 26 billion. In less than three years, you got to 500 million in revenue. That's crazy, half a billion in revenue in less than three years.

**Scott Wu** (0:25)
Our customers in the last six months or so have also grown their usage in the range of like 11 to 12x. Once you've solved AGI, you just take over the entire world and then there's just one entity that rules the world. I just don't think that's the right future for us. There is nothing that humans do that AIs can't do. Maybe you can just have like an AI engineer buddy that can just do work for you. But that was like the very first moment that we believed it was possible. I think the abundance era is real and I think we'll be like this soon.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:00)
Devin, welcome to Sourcery.

**Scott Wu** (1:02)
Yeah. Great to be here.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:05)
Do you get that a lot?

**Scott Wu** (1:08)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll be in the elevator in my building, and I'll just come down, and people will be like, are you Devin?
And then, well, I'm actually not Devin, but yes, I understand what you're asking me.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:24)
Oh gosh, damn. Well, Scott, welcome to Sourcery. We're in Paris, which is pretty cool. We're here for the RAISE Summit.
It's like this huge AI Summit. I think this is like their second or their third year. You're going to be on stage?

**Scott Wu** (1:39)
Yeah, I'll be on stage tomorrow. I just landed an hour ago. I came straight here.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:42)
Well, it's awesome to have you on. I'm excited to talk through the state of Cognition and autonomous coding agents today. It's very pressing. Did you know that?

**Scott Wu** (1:53)
I did actually, yeah. I mean, I can't even keep up with it at this point. So, no, things have been going like crazy. I mean, even for us internally, one of the craziest things is, obviously, we use Devin to build Devin. In fact, we almost exclusively use Devin to build Devin at this point, like 95 percent of the code or something is written by Devin.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:12)
Really?

**Scott Wu** (2:12)
But the crazy thing is, even in the last six months, if you ask people, like, yeah, it's been going on for three or four years now, which is true, it has been. But even in the last six months, I think the number for us was like, our total amount of code shipped is roughly 7x in that time.
And so it's like the number of PRs we've shipped, the amount of code, and obviously, literal output, you know, like, there's different ways in terms of how you actually measure the productivity that you get out of it. But I think in practice, like, we're just able to do so much more and get so much more leverage in even this period of time. Like, the models just keep getting better. I think there's more and more that's been kind of fleshed out, I would say, with the product experience. And so, yeah, things are flying. It's crazy.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:55)
So, how do you measure the productivity of it?

**Scott Wu** (2:57)
Yeah, it's a great question. So, a couple of things I'd say on this, first of all, I think obviously, literal token is just not the right answer.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:06)
Really?

**Scott Wu** (3:07)
I mean, lots of people talk about that. You know, I think the token, I say the token maximum era lasted from January to May of 2026

**Molly O'Shea** (3:16)
RIP.

**Scott Wu** (3:17)
Yeah, RIP. It was a fun time. But no, I mean, I think we're now at this point where, obviously, what you care about is outcomes and what you're actually delivering. And so, we see how much we're shipping, we're seeing how much we're doing. Obviously, what do we care about is, where are we getting to with the products? What are we actually delivering to our customers and our users? And I think that's roughly the same for every business.
There's no secret trick or there's no easy way out in terms of measuring actual ROI, productivity and so on.
But a lot of it comes down to actually looking to each of the outcomes that you're driving. And so for us, obviously, we have all the KPIs, the business that we track and that we kind of follow. And when we think about our output, a lot of what we think about is obviously, it's like how quickly are we growing those numbers as opposed to anything that we actually look at in terms of tokens or spend or something like that.