Person
Co-founder and CEO of Cognition, an AI startup known for its Devin autonomous coding agent.
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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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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The model averages 53 steps a run against SWE-1.7's 127, and Cognition says its mean rollout cost is 64% below Fable 5.1's on a leaderboard Cognition built, runs and grades. Reproducing that takes Devin's harness.
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The Series E takes company-reported run-rate from $492M to close to $900M in four months, but nothing in the announcement says how much of that is Devin agent work and how much is Windsurf editor seats.
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The Series E doubled the valuation while run-rate revenue rose 83% to nearly $900m, so the price per dollar of revenue barely moved, which leaves the undisclosed gross margin under an $800m compute burn as the open question.
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The round is still under negotiation, but the multiple it implies will outlast the negotiation. That multiple is the figure every seller of coding agents will get measured against the next time procurement asks why the seat price moved.
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A denial of a Bloomberg report on SpaceX buying Cognition leaves the compute relationship unaddressed, and leaves buyers choosing coding tools from a shrinking independent field.
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Bloomberg says SpaceX approached Cognition. Its CEO says no talks happened. Either way, the pattern is compute traded for developer data, and that reprices any single-vendor coding bet.
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