Company
Cognition AI is an artificial intelligence startup that builds Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer agent designed to independently plan and write code.
Benchmark's partners told TechCrunch Disrupt that AI is straining venture capital's rule against backing direct rivals. Founders with board observers or investors in rival startups now have reason to decide what each of them can see.
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Crunchbase counted 38 new unicorns worth $71 billion in September, putting 2026 at 311 and on track for second place behind 2021. Step-ups at Cognition, Crusoe and Mistral total about three-quarters of what the newcomers added.
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Andreessen Horowitz, Insight and Sequoia were among at least 22 investors in 10 or more Q3 venture rounds, most of them doing more deals as funding fell. Crunchbase ties the lower total to the absence of new record AI megarounds, while its lead-investor dollar rankings turn on a few multi-billion checks.
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Hone raised a $60 million seed round led by Benchmark and Index Ventures for AI agents that pursue business goals over weeks or months. Buyers have only Hone's own account of its safeguards to judge them by, because Hone has not disclosed revenue or customer results.
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Goldman Sachs will have new finance hires supervise AI agents from their first day, Asia Pacific chief Kevin Sneader said on October 8. The only reported productivity gain, more than 20%, is in engineering, so juniors checking agents in compliance and accounting is still an untested bet.
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Investors put $92 billion into North American startups in the third quarter, 35% less than in the second, Crunchbase data show. Crunchbase ties most of the gap to OpenAI and Anthropic skipping megarounds, so the swing measures two companies' calendars more than investor appetite.
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The Neuron gave it a browser, a Mac, a broken Blender install and an hour. What changed was how rarely it stopped to ask permission, which makes the next piece of work a harness problem rather than a prompt problem.
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Dioxus engineers already had code running inside Devin's command line, and they arrive with a cloud harness that snapshots and forks virtual machines on five operating systems. Neither side called it an acquisition.
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Anthropic engineer Steve Weis factored the 270-digit RSA-896 in ten days with Claude and up to 2,048 idle GPUs. Cognition estimates that factoring one 1024-bit number costs about $30 million, a sum a hyperscaler could spend.
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Factory CEO Matan Grinberg says he fired advisor Chris Degnan, who two hours later announced he is chief revenue officer at $48 billion rival Cognition. Founders whose investors also back their rivals carry the same exposure on their own boards.
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Vinod Khosla publicly sided with Cognition against Factory AI, which his firm helped fund in a $200 million round last month. For founders who share investors with a rival, the episode argues for writing observer access and investor conflicts into the contract.
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Cognition says its SWE-2 model produced up to 4.8 times more total token throughput on Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 than on GB200, in a test on CoreWeave. The company-run result points to more agent capacity per system, but whether long coding tasks get cheaper depends on what the new systems cost per hour.
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Factory CEO Matan Grinberg says board observer Chris Degnan passed confidential information to Cognition, the $48 billion rival that made him revenue chief. Degnan denies it, and the accounts published so far do not establish that anything changed hands.
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Factory CEO Matan Grinberg says he terminated board observer Chris Degnan for weeks of talks with Cognition, the $48 billion rival hiring him as revenue chief. Degnan and Cognition deny wrongdoing, so the fight turns on when an observer owes a board notice of talks with a rival.
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CoreWeave now rents Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 racks, with first customer Cognition reporting up to 4.8x the token throughput on SWE-2 inference. That figure is a best case from a single inference workload, and it is the only customer result behind the launch.
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OpenAI's new Sign in with ChatGPT lets people carry their identity and existing AI allowance into third-party apps, starting with 16 launch partners. For product teams, new users arrive signed in with AI budget to spend, and OpenAI holds both.
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OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol halves cached-input pricing to $0.10 per million tokens and leaves standard rates at $2 and $10. Agents that resend long context collect the saving, while other buyers weigh gains shown mostly in OpenAI's own tests.
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OpenAI says ChatGPT will suggest third-party apps mid-conversation to its 1.2 billion weekly users, who can connect and use them without leaving the chat. Teams that rely on app stores for discovery now face a second storefront where the assistant makes the pick.
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Salesforce is packaging Anthropic, GitHub, Cognition and Vercel agents into Slack channels. The shared piece is not a model or a runtime. It is the conversation.
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The saving comes off cache reads, so it lands unevenly across teams, and the model's most sensitive capability now reaches users through a credential issued by an access program, not a purchase order a budget holder can sign off alone. Both changes move the decision away from the budget holder.
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