The vibe coding startup is worth $10.2 billion, making one of its founders a billionaire.
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In September, Cognition, a buzzy vibe-coding startup, announced it had raised $400 million, vaulting its worth to $10.2 billion. The new valuation enriched the startup’s three young founders, making them the latest to strike gold amid the generative AI frenzy.
The influx of cash appears to have made one of the founders, CTO Steven Hao, a billionaire, according to financial documents viewed by Forbes. Based on his stake in the company at the time of the fundraise, Hao is worth an estimated $1.3 billion. Product Chief Walden Yan falls just short of the billion-dollar mark with roughly $830 million. And CEO Scott Wu, with the smallest ownership stake of the three, has an estimated net worth of close to $600 million. Cognition declined to comment on the net worths of its founders.
Backed by blue chip investors including Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures, Cognition is the maker of Devin, a coding agent used by businesses including Citibank and fintech Ramp. It allows software engineers to code projects by typing in simple prompts, or to maintain existing codebases — outsourcing repetitive and mundane tasks to AI. It competes with other vibe coding players, including wildly popular Cursor, as well as Anthropic’s Claude, known for its coding prowess.
Cognition’s three founders are all gold medalist coders who met on the competitive circuit. Wu and Hao started competing against each other as 15-year-olds in math olympiad tournaments. Before Cognition, Hao was a top engineer at Scale AI, the data labeling giant that sold nearly half its company to Meta. Wu, originally from Louisiana, became a very niche meme in the AI world two years ago when a video of him dominating his competition in a mathlete-style contest went viral. “Plot twist: devin AI is just scott answering your questions in a messaging app,” one commenter said. Yan, the youngest of the trio, was a Neo Scholar, participating in the program founded by early Facebook investor Ali Partovi to find promising tech talent while they’re still in college. Unlike Thiel Fellows, they don’t have to drop out of college, but Yan nevertheless quit Harvard to pursue Cognition.
It’s not clear why Hao has a bigger stake than both Yan and Wu. The founders did not respond to questions from Forbes, and the company said it couldn’t comment. Forbes also was unable to confirm their current ages. Hao and Wu were 28 in December 2024 when Forbes first covered them. Yan was just 21.
The founders’ windfalls come as the AI boom has been minting new billionaires at a breakneck pace. In October, the three founders of Mercor, an AI data labeling startup, became the youngest self-made tech billionaires ever at age 22, beating out Mark Zuckerberg, who hit the milestone one year older. At the time, the Mercor trio supplanted 27-year-old Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan as youngest billionaire in the world at the moment — a title he held for just 20 days. Before that, Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, 28, had bragging rights as the youngest self-made billionaire for roughly 18 months. Meanwhile, Kalshi cofounder Luana Lopez Lara, 29, became the world’s youngest woman billionaire after the betting platform’s valuation spiked to $11 billion.
Last year, Cognition became part of a whirlwind saga that shook up the vibe coding ecosystem. For months, OpenAI had been rumored to be buying Windsurf, a rival AI coding startup. But in a surprise twist, the startup’s founders announced they were instead joining Google in a $2.4 billion deal. Two days later, Cognition said it was buying the remainder of Windsurf for an undisclosed sum. “The new Cognition will work faster than ever,” Wu said in a video announcing the deal, sitting next to Windsurf’s new CEO Jeff Wang. “We want to redefine how humans and agents work together.”
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