cognition
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Walden Yan and the Problem of Giving a Machine the Whole Story
A gold medal in competitive programming taught Walden Yan to spot patterns under pressure. At Cognition, his harder problem is helping an AI engineer remember enough context to finish the job.
Steven Hao and the Problem That Outgrew the Contest
A silver and then a gold medal put him on the programming map. At Cognition, the former Scale AI engineer is asking a harder question: what happens when software can take responsibility for software?
Arctop
Arctop is a cognition company building software that decodes the human brain. Its AI platform translates electrical brain-activity signals from everyday wearables - headbands, earbuds, and VR/AR headsets - into real-time, actionable insight about focus, emotion, intention, and memory. Founded in 2016 by neuroscientist Dan Furman and engineer Eitan Kay, Arctop licenses its non-invasive brain-decoding software to developers and enterprises across health, entertainment, education, and government, positioning itself as the intelligence layer between brain-sensing hardware and the applications that use it.
Windsurf
Windsurf (formerly Codeium, originally Exafunction) is a Mountain View-based AI coding company that built one of the first agentic AI-native IDEs, powered by its Cascade agent. Founded in 2021 by MIT classmates Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen, it grew to over 1 million developers and $82M ARR before a dramatic July 2025 split: Google paid roughly $2.4B to hire its founders and license its technology, while Cognition (maker of Devin) acquired the remaining product, brand, team, and customer base. In June 2026, Cognition relaunched the Windsurf IDE as Devin Desktop, an agent command center for managing local and cloud coding agents.
Cognition’s billion-dollar bet: give the backlog to Devin
Cognition turned an AI coding agent into a business reporting $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate. The revealing part is what it learned about waiting, reviewing and letting several machines share one job.
Jeff Wang
Jeff Wang is the CEO of Windsurf, an AI-powered coding assistant that was acquired by Cognition (makers of Devin) in July 2025. Previously Windsurf's Head of Business, Jeff stepped into the CEO role during a chaotic week in which the company's founders departed to Google and a $3B OpenAI acquisition fell through. Working through a single frantic weekend, he negotiated a new deal with Cognition that protected all 250 employees. A former engineer who detoured through Cisco and Salesforce before betting his career on early-stage AI startups, Jeff is also a General Partner at RNR Capital and co-founder of RocketFuel Education.
Scott Wu
Scott Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the AI company behind Devin - widely recognized as the world's first autonomous AI software engineer. A three-time International Olympiad in Informatics gold medalist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Wu started coding at age 9, interned at a fintech startup as a high schooler alongside future Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, briefly attended Harvard, then spent five years building Lunchclub as CTO before co-founding Cognition in 2023 with fellow competitive programming champions. Under his leadership, Cognition grew from a 10-person apartment startup to a $10.2 billion company with over 200 employees, acquired Windsurf in July 2025, and raised $675 million in total funding - with Devin's annualized revenue surging from $1 million to $73 million in under a year.
Swyx
Shawn 'Swyx' Wang is a Singaporean-American developer, writer, and community builder who left a $350K hedge fund career to teach himself to code at 30 - then coined the term 'AI Engineer,' built one of tech's most influential AI podcasts (Latent Space), and launched the AI Engineer conference series that put 15,000 developers in rooms together to figure out what this job actually is.