AI News: Cognition Labs Hits $2B Valuation After $175M Funding

After several months of seeking a $2 billion valuation, six-month-old Cognition Labs has now hit the milestone. This record is a reflection of investors’ growing interest and confidence in the potential of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup.

From a $350M Valuation to $2B

In a recent fundraiser, Cognition Labs secured $175 million, led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund to value it at $2 billion. At this valuation, Cognition Labs joins the likes of French AI company Mistral and Perplexity AI which are already valued in billions.

Mistral is already having conversations with potential investors about raising $533 million, a funding which if achieved will push its valuation to $5.3 billion.

Cognition Labs was founded in November 2023 by Scott Wu, Walden Yan, and Steven Hao. By the start of this year, it was already valued at $350 million. This was after a $21 million Series A funding round that was led by Founders Fund. In no time, Cognition Labs began to talk about raising its valuation to $2 billion. This implied that it planned to raise its January valuation by six times in only a few weeks.

At the time, Founder’s Fund hinted at investing in the new funding round. Notably, Cognition Labs, which is currently building an AI tool that writes code, allegedly turned down a valuation offer of $1 billion.

Cognition Labs could use this new fund to push further development, especially to enhance its products.

Cognition Labs Defies Odds With Devin

Such a massive and rapid increase in valuation demonstrates the growing interest in AI-powered tools and in Cognition’s case, a heightened interest in tools that can automate software development tasks. Therefore, it could be said that Cognition Labs’ launch of Devin, contributed significantly to its latest valuation.

Devin, an AI software engineer, was launched in March, sparking curiosity amongst technology enthusiasts. The AI tool was screened by several top tech companies and has passed through several practical engineering interviews. Notably, Devin can perform autonomous coding and finetune AI models. It is capable of completing tasks on its own without interference from humans.

The tool has shown promising results including a 13.86% accuracy in resolving issues independently. This figure surpassed the 1.96% recorded for a previous best model.