Cognition was founded in August 2023 by Scott Wu, Steven Hao, and Walden Yan, three competitive programmers who built the company in San Francisco with backing from Founders Fund. It launched publicly in March 2024 with a demo video of Devin, marketed as the first autonomous AI software engineer, and the clip drew more than 20 million views within 72 hours.
Unlike an in-editor autocomplete tool, Devin operates inside its own sandboxed virtual machine: given a ticket or task, it plans the implementation, writes and runs code, executes tests, and opens a pull request against a team's existing repository and tools. Pricing runs on Agent Compute Units (ACUs), where roughly 15 minutes of Devin's active work consumes one ACU, billed around $2.25 per unit on the standard plan.
Devin suits engineering teams that want to hand off well-scoped, repetitive tickets so human engineers can focus on architecture and design decisions. A free tier exists for light use, Pro starts at $20/month, Max runs $200/month for heavier workloads, and Teams pricing is $80/month plus $40 per seat; enterprise customers negotiate ACU-based contracts directly.
