Cogna was founded in May 2023 by Ben Peters and Lars Mennen, with offices in London and Austin, Texas. Peters had previously worked on self-driving car technology before turning to what TechCrunch described as AI that writes enterprise software, and the company raised a $4.75 million seed round followed by a $15 million Series A led by Notion Capital.
Rather than shipping a self-serve app builder, Cogna's team works directly with an operations team to identify a specific bottleneck, then uses generative AI alongside its own tooling to build and deploy a working application for that problem within about two weeks. Its outcome-based pricing model bills clients once the delivered application is functioning in production, shifting delivery risk onto Cogna rather than the customer.
Cogna targets enterprise operations leaders who have a defined workflow problem but lack the internal engineering capacity to build custom software for it. There is no published price list since every engagement is scoped and quoted individually based on the application being built.
