President @cognition. Past: director of engineering @Scale_AI, startup founder, ML scientist @Tesla Autopilot, researcher @StanfordSVL.
San Francisco
Joined January 2013
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Seeing lots of questions like: wait, I thought Windsurf was already acquired? What is Cognition buying?
Let me explain. Windsurf the company is an *extraordinary* asset. It was missing its founders and research team, but it has a beloved product, valuable IP, an incredible business ($82M ARR with enterprise growth doubling quarter-over-quarter), known brand, and most importantly: a world-class team in every function—GTM, enterprise engineering, and much more.
With today’s news, we’re adding all that firepower to Cognition to deliver the most complete AI coding solution in the market. And we’re doing so in a way that treats the team with the value and respect that they deserve.
And here’s what’s also ours:
- all improvements we build on top of Windsurf’s IP from here
- all Windsurf training data
- all Windsurf trademark and brand assets
The meme over the weekend was “Is Windsurf now an empty shell?” The opposite is true, and we’re going to be even stronger together. Today is a huge win for Windsurf and Devin customers everywhere.
Russell Kaplan retweeted
Cursor and Windsurf both launched new models.
So I decided to put them to the test in speed, up to date info, and app creation.
Here are the full breakdown & results:
(Video is not sped up 🤯)
Russell Kaplan retweeted
Devin now has full computer use capabilities and can share screen recordings.
You can control desktop apps, build and QA mobile apps, and automate tedious work.
Here are some examples that blew our team away:
1. Making a desktop game
We released a custom model in Windsurf. It is extremely fast. And competitive on SWE-Bench Pro.
Try it out!
Today we’re releasing SWE-1.5, our fast agent model.
It achieves near-SOTA coding performance while setting a new standard for speed. Now available in @windsurf.
It's been great working with @appliedcompute! The narrower the ML problem, the higher the value of specialized models. Congrats to the team on the launch.
Generalists are useful, but it’s not enough to be smart.
Advances come from specialists, whether human or machine.
To have an edge, agents need specific expertise, within specific companies, built on models trained on specific data.
We call this Specific Intelligence.
It's what we're building at Applied Compute.
We unlock the latent knowledge inside a company, use it to train custom models, and deploy an in-house agent workforce that reports to your team.
We work with sophisticated companies that have already captured early gains from general models, like @cognition, @DoorDash, and @mercor_ai. They’re pulling even further ahead with proprietary in-house agents that don’t need to wait for the next public model release.
Together, we are building and validating models and agents in days instead of months, achieving state-of-the-art performance on customer evals.
Our team has high density and low latency. Our founders all worked on different parts of this problem while they were researchers at OpenAI — @ypatil125 as a key member on the agentic software engineer effort (Codex), @rhythmrg as a core contributor to the first RL-trained reasoning model (o1), and @lindensli as a core contributor on ML systems and infrastructure for RL training.
Two-thirds of the team are former founders, and everyone brings a deep technical background, from top AI researchers to Math Olympiad winners.
We are backed by $80M in funding from Benchmark, Sequoia, Lux, Elad Gil, Victor Lazarte, Omri Casspi, and others. With their support, we are growing the team, scaling deployments, and bringing to market the first generation of agent workforces built on specific models.
In short:
1. We are building Specific Intelligence for specific work at specific companies.
2. That will power in-house agent workforces to support their human bosses.
3. That in turn will unlock AI’s full potential through humanity’s greatest engine of progress: thriving corporations in a free market.
Coding agents are either smart, or fast - but rarely both. One reason is that gathering the right context takes a long time.
Today, we introduced an in-house model family optimized for extremely fast context retrieval, delivering higher retrieval quality in <1/10th the latency.
Russell Kaplan retweeted
AI models are advancing at an unprecedented rate. @Cognition's @russelljkaplan discusses the future of autonomous AI agents – and how they could transform software engineering with capabilities that rival those of senior engineers: click.gs.com/0tgj
Sonnet 4.5 is the most important coding model release in a while. From our early-access evals, we estimate it's roughly the same jump in capabilities between Claude 3.5 and 4. As a result, Devin is >2x faster and 12% better on our internal benchmarks.
Really thoughtful post from the legendary @swyx about why he joined Cognition. He has an amazing knack for predicting the future and writing about it clearly. Welcome to the team!
ok life update: i'll be joining @Cognition!
• Cog just went from 0 to $10b in 2 years
• Net burn $20m in company history
• Avg successful Devin impl sees >5x growth, $1.5m/yr customer expanded >10x in 8 months (not typo)
• Windsurf x Cog cross sell going great, looking fwd to cross build. Lighthouse customers in every vertical.
• Windsurf's polish + Wave 13/14 are looking v HYPE! more work to do on Windsurf Tab
Here's the 5 decision points I had to cross to "buy" Cognition's rise as an Agent Lab that has the potential to be as dominant in the Decade of Agents:
• Short Code timelines, Long AGI timelines
• The rise of Agent Labs
• Owning the Sync/Async spectrum
• Start high, go low
• Cracked Engineers + Ramped GTM
This is probably TMI but I like to record thoughts in public so I can learn when I am wrong, and for others to follow along. Happy reading, in reply tweet.
also: Most of @smol_ai capital base is rolling over to Cognition's round today. I'll be returning the rest. AINews and SmolTalk will remain my passion projects.
I will continue to operate @aiDotEngineer and @latentspacepod ferociously independent of Cognition. All Cognition competitors were given ample heads up + red carpet to AIE CODE. Ben and I are BEYOND excited to have Lia step up as the new General Manager of AIE!
Victor is a legend. Incredibly helpful to Cognition and a wonderful human. Excited for his next chapter.
After 2 great years at benchmark, I’ve made the difficult decision to leave the firm in order to pursue a new adventure.
Benchmark simply excels in the craft of early stage investing and forming deep partnerships with founders. I’ll always be grateful to have had the opportunity to partner with and learn from great investors at benchmark, both current and past. I especially want to thank Peter for his mentorship, first on my board and later as a colleague over the past 6 years. While I’m eager to start investing my personal capital, I’ll certainly miss the great colleagues here.
The best part of investing is to partner closely with generational founders and help them at the start of their journeys when faith and support matter the most.
During my two years at benchmark, I’ve had the privilege to join the boards for remarkable founders like @BrendanFoody at @mercor_ai , @DLeitersdorf at @DecartAI, @joshua_xu_ at @HeyGen_Official , @ypatil125 @lindensli and Rhythm at Applied compute , and other incredible companies that are still unannounced. I’ll also continue to serve on the board of Brex, one of my first seed investments, with appreciation for Pedro and Henrique who trusted me as one of their first board members.
These founders have pulled off feats that would have seemed impossible when they started. Mercor has grown run rate over 100X into 9 figures in 1 year, Decart has created realtime generative videos that feel like magic, HeyGen is helping businesses create 10M minutes of AI video every month, Applied Compute is bringing frontier RL to any enterprise, and Brex has now provided credit cards to over 30K businesses.
It’s an honor to continue to support their growth.
Before benchmark, I was a founder for 12 years, so I know how much that word means. Nothing has brought me more joy over the past 2 years than to have some of you describe me as a co-founder to your business.
As for what’s next, I’ll continue leading rounds personally (including one where I am partnering again with my benchmark colleagues!) and plan to build a new investment practice. I look forward to sharing more soon. Thank you again to Benchmark for the wonderful experience.
This was brave to share publicly.
Welcome to Cognition, @premqnair!
I’ve joined Cognition to continue to work on the future of software engineering.
I was employee #2 at Windsurf and have worked on AI+code for years. There’s never been a more exciting time and place for it than now at Cognition.
I had a place at Google DeepMind as part of the deal. I won’t go into detail for legal reasons, but I’d like to be transparent about my personal situation.
I was given an offer that would explode same day. I had to forfeit all of my vested shares earned over my 3.5+ years at Windsurf. I was ultimately given a payout of only 1% of what my shares would have been worth at the time of the deal.
In going to Cognition, I’ve chosen a different direction.
For someone who loves software engineering, Cognition feels like home. It reminds me of the energy of the earliest days of Windsurf, where we wrote excessive amounts of code and had excessive amounts of fun.
Really excited to see how we can take the best of Devin and Windsurf to make the world’s best IDE and coding agents.
Russell Kaplan retweeted
To put it mildly, the past week at Windsurf has been crazy. There have been a lot of different rumors and reports, so I want to share a transparent account of how it actually went down.
Before I start, I just want to say that Varun and Douglas were great founders and this company meant a lot to them, and it should be acknowledged that this whole situation must have been difficult for them as well.
One week ago, last Friday, I walked into the office for our all-hands, where our ~250 people were expecting to hear that we were getting acquired by OpenAI. By that time, I had already learned what was really about to happen and had broken the news to Graham, the new President, and Kevin, the new CTO. You can imagine the shock when the team found out.
It was my job to explain to the company our path forward as a company. In my view, there were a few options: try to raise more money (VCs were offering), try to sell the company (we had interest from multiple parties), try to distribute (although there were liabilities to wind down), or try to keep running the company. Although we had lost some great people and taken a serious blow to morale, we still had all of our IP, product, and strong talent including an excellent GTM machine - the core components of the company were still there.
The mood was very bleak. Some people were upset about financial outcomes or colleagues leaving, while others were worried about the future. A few were in tears, and the Q&A had been understandably hostile. In distress, people asked if we could distribute the cash immediately, but we also needed it to pay bills and keep the product working for customers.
After trying to steady the team as much as we could, Graham and I spent the rest of the evening on calls, trying to identify every available option.
Out of the blue, we got a text and email, from Scott and Russell, with the message, “Chat?” It was around 5:30pm, exactly this time last week.
I immediately called Graham and told him I thought this combination made sense. Cognition had been the one team our people had respected the most. While they had overinvested in engineering, they had frankly underinvested in GTM and Marketing, and our teams in those functions are nothing short of world class. On the other hand, we now were missing a Core Engineering team, and there’s no better group of AI engineers than the lineup Cognition has assembled.
Then, there was the product logic. Devin would benefit from a foreground synchronous agent, while we needed a remote asynchronous agent. The teams and products together would be able to create an unrivaled end to end platform.
We took the Cognition approach very seriously from the start and launched right into negotiations. Scott and his team moved fast, and while the timeline was exploding with memes and commentary between Friday and Monday, Scott and Russell spent that time in our office, working tirelessly to get a deal done in record time. Saturday rolled in, and I brought Kevin to the office. At this point, we were still having 1:1s with our enterprise engineers to retain them, and at the same time, we were trying to get more information to diligence Cognition while reviewing other potential partners.
Saturday, I was still getting inbound interest from potential acquirers, including one we had all looked up to for a long time. But by then, Scott was already in our conference room with physical papers to sign and was handing me a pen. We had already made up our minds that there was no better partner than Cognition, even with other excellent and impressive companies interested. We quickly brought in lawyers to review the LOI and signed that day, a little over 24 hours after Scott’s cold outreach.
Saturday had been spent understanding each other’s businesses, and when the sun came up Sunday morning while we were in the office, we prepared to move on to getting the deal finalized. The Windsurf team had been through too many twists and turns, so both Scott and I felt that the next transition for them had to truly be final.
The other priority during this process, which Scott and I aligned on and was one of the things that helped me realize he was the right partner, was that we needed to take care of all Windsurf employees. Their work and talent had gotten us to this point; they deserved to be paid for that, and we wanted to give them a better price than any of the previous scenarios. That resulted in a key part of the deal: structuring it to give a payout to every employee, to waive all cliffs, and to accelerate all vesting for Windsurf equity.
On Sunday, an army of lawyers from both sides descended on the office, having been challenged by Scott and Russell to get this deal finalized within 24 hours. We ate and slept (or at least tried to grab quick naps between discussions) in the office through the weekend to get it done. Our teams and lawyers stayed up all night Sunday working out the final details. On Monday morning, we went over every detail again, got board approvals, and the documents were ready to sign. One of our lawyers said it was one of the fastest deals they’d seen.
Monday 9:30am, we signed our definitive agreement for Cognition to acquire Windsurf. Scott had given a heads up to Cognition employees, and we had another all-hands scheduled for Windsurf employees at 10am that morning. After the traumatic announcement on Friday, Scott and Russell wanted us to be able to open Monday with good news and we wanted to handle this new announcement in a much better way for employees. In fact Russell took a red eye the night before and somehow made it to the Austin office just in time.
We held Monday’s all-hands in the same room as Friday’s, and this time Scott was by my side at the front of the room. It was a blur, but the highlights I’ll always remember were getting to tell employees what we had negotiated for them (“We’ve decided to give you 1 year of vest, OH, and years 2, 3, and 4 as well!”) and Scott saying, “A founder goes down with the ship.” The applause from our people seemed to last forever, and I was on the verge of tears myself.
Now comes the real work. We are officially one company, operating as two entities, but with much to do both internally and externally. We have work to do on both our team and on our product, to realize our shared ambitions. It was a wild ride this week, and now the story has been told. We are excited to move on to the next chapter. We’re putting our heads back down to focus on building the future of AI together.
Russell Kaplan retweeted
I love seeing teams show resilience.
@windsurf_ai made it through all the uncertainty to:
1. Bring back 1st party support for Sonnet
2. Offer one of the best deals with 250 Sonnet 4 requests for just $15 / month
Hope the team keeps shipping with @cognition_labs! Competition is good for users :)
Claude Sonnet 4 is back via first party support from @AnthropicAI!
Available at 2x credits (limited time discount) per request for Pro and Teams users. That’s 250 requests a month!
We are so back
Claude Sonnet 4 is back via first party support from @AnthropicAI!
Available at 2x credits (limited time discount) per request for Pro and Teams users. That’s 250 requests a month!
This was supposed to be our big announcement today...
Excited to be working with @Citi!
Incredibly excited to share that Cognition is acquiring Windsurf. What an insane weekend - from first call after 5pm on Friday to a signed definitive agreement this morning. There’s a lot to build!
Cognition has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf.
The acquisition includes Windsurf’s IP, product, trademark and brand, and strong business. Above all, it includes Windsurf’s world-class people, whom we’re privileged to welcome to our team.
We are also honoring their talent and hard work in building Windsurf into the great business it is today. This transaction is structured so that 100% of Windsurf employees will participate financially. They will also have all vesting cliffs waived and will receive fully accelerated vesting for their work to date.
At Cognition we have focused on developing robust and secure autonomous agents, while Windsurf has pioneered the agentic IDE. Devin + Windsurf are a powerful combination for the developers we serve. Working side by side, we’ll soon enable you to plan tasks in an IDE powered by Devin’s codebase understanding, delegate chunks of work to multiple Devins in parallel, complete the highest-leverage parts yourself with the help of autocomplete, and stitch it all back together in the same IDE.
Cognition and Windsurf are united behind a shared vision for the future of software engineering, and there’s never been a better time to build. Welcome to our new colleagues from Windsurf!
