Teams consisting of the post-1995 and post-2000 generations have secured a valuation of 320 billion yuan.

In the AI track, the biggest wealth creation myth for young people after Cursor has arrived.

Recently, AI programming company Cognition announced the completion of a Series E financing of more than 2 billion US dollars, with a post-money valuation reaching 48 billion US dollars (about 320 billion RMB). This round of financing of Cognition is extremely popular, with more than 30 investment institutions, almost gathering half of Silicon Valley's top VCs: the lead investors are A16Z and Accel, and the follow-on investors include Benchmark, Kleiner Perkins, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DST, General Catalyst... etc., as well as NVIDIA.

None of the three founders of this company were born earlier than 1995. CEO Scott Wu and CTO Steven Hao were both born in 1996, and CPO Walden Yan is even a member of Generation Z born after 2000. As can be seen from their names, all three are of Chinese descent. They also share another common point - all of them are gold medalists of the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI).

Child prodigies, dropping out of top universities, this is a young entrepreneur story with a plot so standard that it is almost a little surreal.

Child Prodigies Team Up to Launch Startup

The biggest label of Cognition is that its founding team has an extremely high concentration of IOI gold medalists.

IOI is a global computer competition for middle school students. How high is its gold content? Take China as an example, there are only 4 competition quotas every year. Just getting the qualification to participate is already a top student qualified for direct admission to Tsinghua University and Peking University. If you win a medal in the competition, you will basically get a green light when applying for any program of any top university at home and abroad. Wang Xiaochuan, former CEO of Sogou and founder of Baichuan Intelligence, was admitted to the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University with an IOI gold medal back then.

And all three founders of Cognition have won the IOI gold medal.

Scott Wu won the IOI gold medal for three consecutive years from 2012 to 2014, and ranked first in the total score globally in 2014. Steven Hao won the IOI gold medal in 2014, ranking sixth in the total score globally. Walden Yan won the IOI gold medal in 2020, ranking 19th globally. After winning the IOI gold medal, they all entered top universities as a matter of course. Scott Wu and Walden Yan both went to Harvard University, and Steven Hao was admitted to MIT. However, Scott Wu only studied at Harvard for two years before choosing to drop out to start a business.

Scott Wu once said that the founding team of Cognition basically knew each other when they were teenagers in the competition period, and have kept in touch ever since. In 2022, the three got together to consider starting a business, and their initial idea was to do a Web3 project. But soon the wave of AI large models came, and they quickly decided to shift their entrepreneurial direction to AI programming, and officially founded Cognition in November 2023. At that time, Walden Yan, the youngest member of the team, was still studying at Harvard, and the next year he won the "Thiel Fellowship" program initiated by Peter Thiel, and then chose to drop out to start a business.

In March 2024, Cognition launched a product known as "the world's first AI programmer" — Devin. In the demo video, Devin demonstrated multiple functions such as independently reading documents, identifying bugs, and writing tests. These functions may not seem rare now, but at that point in time, other AI programming tools only stayed at simple code completion. Devin's product concept was very advanced and bold, so it quickly became viral on social media.

Therefore, Founders Fund under Peter Thiel issued a check of 21 million US dollars to Cognition immediately, with a valuation of 350 million US dollars. Only one month later, in April 2024, Founders Fund again led the Series A financing of 175 million US dollars for Cognition, pushing the valuation up to 2 billion US dollars.

In the next two years, as the AI wave grew higher and higher, Cognition's valuation rose all the way. The valuation of Series B financing in March 2025 was 4 billion US dollars, the valuation of Series C financing in September 2025 was 10.2 billion US dollars, and the valuation of Series D financing in May 2026 was 26 billion US dollars. Then only 4 months later, the valuation of Series E financing almost doubled to 48 billion US dollars.

Bringing "996" Work Culture to Silicon Valley

On the rise of Cognition, one acquisition transaction played a very key role.

In July 2025, the well-known AI programming tool Windsurf was acquired by Google in a "poaching all core talents" way. At that time, Windsurf was already one of the top AI programming tools with hundreds of thousands of daily active users, which attracted the interest of Google that was in urgent need of supplementing its programming capabilities. However, Google's "acquisition" method was to spend about 2.4 billion US dollars to poach Windsurf's CEO, co-founders and dozens of core R&D personnel as a package, but was unwilling to acquire Windsurf's equity or take over the company's operation.

As a result, the remaining more than 200 employees of Windsurf woke up and found that their bosses were gone. In the midst of this chaos, Cognition acted decisively to take over all of Windsurf's products, brands, IP and the remaining team. The transaction price was not disclosed, but external estimates are no more than 300 million US dollars, including stock payment.

Facts have proved that this transaction is very cost-effective. Before the transaction, Cognition's daily active users were only about 10,000, and Windsurf brought more than 350 enterprise customers, hundreds of thousands of daily active users and a complete IDE product at one time. Two months later, Cognition's valuation jumped from 4 billion US dollars to 10.2 billion US dollars.

However, it was also this transaction that made Cognition's "wolf culture" well known to all in Silicon Valley. When integrating Windsurf, Cognition gave more than 200 former Windsurf employees two choices: either take 9 months of salary compensation and leave, or accept Cognition's corporate culture.

What is the specific corporate culture of Cognition? According to media reports, Cognition's employees need to work more than 80 hours a week, go to the office six days a week, and keep their phones online the remaining one day. Cognition clearly told its employees: "We don't believe in work-life balance here." Scott Wu wrote in an internal letter: "We are the underdogs, which requires us to adopt extreme work standards." He also said: "We are often in the office on weekends, many of our best results are achieved late at night, and many of us live in the office."

Cognition did not hide this culture, and it will be very candid in the job announcement: "Don't treat this as a normal company."

On the other hand, Cognition is quite generous in equity incentives for employees. In the announcement of the acquisition of Windsurf, Cognition promised that all former Windsurf employees would get financial benefits, and tried their best to let them get equity in this transaction by canceling the equity vesting threshold and other methods.

Although Cognition has not disclosed the specific employee shareholding ratio, employees who choose to stay in Cognition should benefit a lot. At present, Cognition has a staff size of about 300-400 people. Averaged by the valuation of 48 billion US dollars, that is more than 120 million US dollars per capita.

The Valuation Myth of 53x ARR

Of course, whether there is moisture in the valuation of 48 billion US dollars is another topic that varies from person to person.

Both Cognition and Cursor are star companies in the AI programming track, and both were founded by young prodigies who dropped out of school, so they are easy to be compared together. In contrast, Cursor has higher popularity and more criticism. Last month, Musk acquired Cursor at a valuation of 60 billion US dollars, and many people still think this is the result of the AI bubble.

If you also hold this view, then Cognition's valuation will definitely make you even more surprised.

Cognition stated in the official statement of Series E financing that since the last round of financing in May, the company's annualized revenue (revenue of the most recent month multiplied by 12) has grown from 492 million US dollars to nearly 900 million US dollars. That is to say, the valuation of 48 billion US dollars is equivalent to about 53 times of ARR.

In this comparison, Cursor's valuation is quite cost-effective. Cursor announced in early June this year that its annualized revenue has exceeded 4 billion US dollars, so the valuation of 60 billion US dollars is only equivalent to 15 times of ARR.

The revenue gap between the two companies also matches their popularity. Cursor is now well known in the programmer community, and people outside the circle have more or less heard of it. But Cognition is still a very niche programming Agent.

However, this is also related to the fact that Cognition has been taking the B2B route since its establishment. In the early days of its founding, Cognition strategically abandoned individual users. On the one hand, it adopted a strict internal test invitation system, on the other hand, the minimum pricing of 500 US dollars per month also blocked ordinary individual developers. At the same time, Cognition focused its resources on serving large enterprise customers. Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, Citibank, Dell and even the U.S. Department of Defense are its customers. It is reported that Citibank has promoted Devin to 40,000 engineers, which can generate more than 100,000 hours of independent Agent working hours per week. This is the largest known Agent deployment project in the financial field.

Although both are AI programming, the positioning of the two companies is actually different.

Cursor is positioned as a "programming assistant", that is, to assist programmers to complete coding work. Cognition's concept is more advanced, emphasizing "one person managing a large number of independent Agents", allowing AI to independently perform tasks such as security/migration/operation and maintenance, and realize end-to-end independent task delivery. In theory, the latter has a larger potential market space, and enterprises may also have higher willingness to pay, so it enjoys a certain valuation premium.

However, up to now, the development of AI programming has made all players converge to the same goal. Cognition launched a 20 US dollars per month subscription plan for individual developers in 2025, and later provided a free entry plan. On the other hand, Cursor is also moving in the direction of Cognition. It has also launched a cloud Agent, allowing AI to take over tasks and run tests in an independent environment, and then hand over the results to humans for inspection. In June 2026, the engineering summary released by Cursor focused on how to run these cloud Agents for a long time.

At the current point in time, the pure coding scenario has been gradually fully covered by AI, and everyone is trying to embed deeper into the enterprise's software development process, striving to become the base platform for enterprise software development. Under this trend, Cognition has certain first-mover advantages. More than 30 top VCs giving Cognition a valuation of 53 times ARR may have their reasons.

This article is from WeChat official account "ChinaVenture", Author: Tao Huidong, Editor: Wang Qingwu, 36Kr is authorized to publish it.