Episode July 27, 2026 43 min 24s

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

From Sourcery Sourcery with Molly O'Shea

Scott Wu, CEO & Co-Founder of Cognition, joins Sourcery in Paris amid the RAISE AI Summit. Cognition is the applied AI lab behind Devin, the autonomous AI software engineer, and Devin Desktop, formerly Windsurf. The company has raised more than $2.5 billion, including a $1 billion round in May 2026 at a $26 billion valuation, while growing annualized revenue from roughly $37 million to $492 million in a year. Devin now writes roughly 95% of Cognition's own code, total code shipped has grown 7x in six months, and customer usage has increased 11x to 12x.

We cover Cognition's acquisition of Windsurf, negotiated over a single weekend after Google's $2.4 billion talent deal, why Scott is keeping Cognition independent, why enterprises won't buy coding agents directly from the model labs, AI's impact on software engineering, the six-month singularity debate, and the origin story of Devin, from fixing a MongoDB error in 2023 to deployments at Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, Citi, Dell, Santander, NASA, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Army.

Recorded July 7, 2026, ahead of Cognition shipping SWE-1.7 on July 8 and acquiring The Interaction Company (maker of Poke) on July 23.

Scott Wu: https://x.com/ScottWu46

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊

YouTube: https://youtu.be/y1XxtvYll4s

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

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𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Scott Wu, Co-Founder & CEO at Cognition

(01:00) The Identity crisis of building Devin

(01:42) How Cognition 7X-ed its output in 6 months

(02:55) The Metric every AI company gets wrong

(04:18) Cognition's 12x growth curve

(07:46) The Windsurf acquisition

(13:26) Scaling overnight: Cognition's hardest week

(15:11) The strategy behind the integration of Cognition products

(17:23) Cognition's merger playbook

(20:01) Why the DMV is Cognition's next big target

(22:59) Why Cognition bet against AI centralization