Inside the Fastest-Growing Category in AI: Scott Wu, CEO of $26B Cognition
Inside the Fastest-Growing Category in AI: Scott Wu, CEO of $26B Cognition
Podcast43 min 24 sec
Listen to Episode
Note: AI-generated summary based on third-party content. Not financial advice. Read more.
Quick Insights

Investors looking to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom should consider buying shares of MongoDB (MDB), which acts as essential core infrastructure as 75% of the Fortune 100 and top AI startups scale their data architectures.

As autonomous coding agents and AI-native applications generate massive volumes of new software and data, foundational database platforms like MongoDB (MDB) are positioned for sustained, long-term growth.

Detailed Analysis

Cognition (Private)

  • Cognition is the creator of Devin, described as the first AI software engineer. The company has raised over $2.5 billion to date at a valuation of $26 billion, achieving $500 million in revenue in less than three years.
  • Major enterprise and institutional customers include Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, Citi, Dell, Santander, NASA, the US Navy, and the US Army.
  • Customer usage has grown aggressively, with users seeing 11x to 12x growth in Devin usage over a six-month period, while Cognition's internal code shipped grew roughly 7x over the same timeframe.
  • The company acquired coding IDE platform Windsurf 11 months prior to the interview in a rapid weekend deal, integrating Windsurf's local developer environment with Devin's remote cloud capabilities to form a unified product suite.
  • Cognition operates independently and remains model-neutral, partnering with multiple leading foundational labs rather than locking into a single provider.
  • The company is actively expanding into government and public sector technology deployment, highlighting massive efficiency gaps in archaic systems like the DMV.

Takeaways

  • Cognition represents a prime example of the rapid monetization and enterprise scaling occurring within autonomous coding agents and the broader application-layer AI market.
  • For private-market investors, the company's hybrid model (combining local developer tools like Windsurf with asynchronous cloud agents) highlights a defensible product-led growth strategy in the competitive AI landscape.

MongoDB (MDB)

  • MongoDB is highlighted as a critical database platform heavily utilized by AI developers and agents. The platform enables applications to store, search, and reason over data in real time using vector search and embeddings (including partnerships with Voyage AI) within a single system.
  • According to the discussion, 75% of the Fortune 100 and leading AI-native startups rely on MongoDB to build and scale data architecture.
  • Historically, MongoDB played a foundational role in Cognition's early development, serving as the first major software troubleshooting task successfully executed by an early prototype of Devin in late 2023.

Takeaways

  • MongoDB (MDB) serves as core infrastructure for the AI and agentic software revolution, benefiting directly from the rising volume of software and data generated by autonomous AI agents.

Brex (Private)

  • Brex is an intelligent finance platform that combines corporate cards, expenses, and banking into a single stack with agentic finance capabilities built into the platform.
  • The platform uses AI agents to automate expense handling, enforce spending policies proactively, and close financial books in minutes.
  • The company counts major next-generation AI players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Vercel, Granola, and Deepgram among its user base.

Takeaways

  • Brex illustrates the expanding enterprise adoption of "agentic finance," where internal business workflows are increasingly managed and automated by AI agents rather than manual human labor.

AssemblyAI (Private)

  • AssemblyAI provides a voice AI infrastructure layer utilized by developers to build speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models.
  • The company's infrastructure serves as critical backend technology for AI-forward applications like Granola, HeyGen, Ashby, and ClickUp, offering high accuracy in transcription and data insight extraction.

Takeaways

  • Infrastructure providers focused on voice AI and speech understanding represent key picks-and-shovels plays within the broader expansion of multimodal artificial intelligence applications.
Ask about this postAnswers are grounded in this post's content.
Episode Description
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 • Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery  • MongoDB–Millions of developers and more than 65,200+ customers across industries, including ~75% of the Fortune 100, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications. With integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, & AI-powered data retrieval, MongoDB helps organizations everywhere move faster, innovate more efficiently, & simplify complex architectures. https://mongodb.com/ai • AssemblyAI–Millions of developers use AssemblyAI to power their voice ai applications and features. One API gives you access to best-in-class speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models for both pre-recorded and real-time audio.  Granola, ClickUp & HeyGen are scaling with AssemblyAI - get $50 of free credits today at http://AssemblyAI.com/sourcery
About Sourcery
Sourcery

Sourcery

By Sourcery with Molly O'Shea

Interviews with the top Investors, CEOs, & Founders