side quests
the pursuits around the product — lunchclub, the upwork demo, openhands, deepwiki, the swe model family, and the diaspora.
the founders' quests
- 2017–2022lunchclub · handed-offlunchclub — scott wu's pre-cognition company, co-founded with vladimir novakovski: an ai 'superconnector' for professional introductions, a16z-backed (~$30m raised), forbes 30 under 30, and the reason andreessen could later say he was backing wu 'for the second time.' wu left in 2022; the startup made him a repeat founder before cognition existed.
- 2024-03the upwork side hustle · ended'devin's upwork side hustle' — the demo where devin reportedly completed real freelance jobs, narrated by walden yan. the quest that produced the debunk: internet of bugs showed the brief had been misread, the bugs self-generated, the 'hours' compressible to ~36 minutes.
the company's quests
- 2023the eight pivots · endedthe crypto pivot that wasn't — per wu's own account, cognition ran ~eight pivots before the autonomous-engineer concept, and the earliest was reportedly a crypto project. exact details are thin and stay unverified.
- 2024-05–azure and aws · continuingthe microsoft relationship — devin on azure announced at build 2024 for code migration and modernization, extended by a multi-year aws strategic collaboration agreement in september 2026. the cloud-vendor distribution channel alongside direct sales.
- 2024-12–the open-source initiative · continuingthe devin open source initiative — free acus for oss maintainers, announced two days after ga, with devin contributing to anthropic's mcp, llamaindex, and zod. later the mcp marketplace (july 2025) made devin a citizen of the server ecosystem it helps maintain.
- 2025-05–deepwiki · activedeepwiki — free ai-generated documentation for any public github repo; grew into devin wiki and devin search inside the paid product. the company's top-of-funnel gift to every codebase on earth.
- 2025-10–the swe model family · activethe swe model family — cognition's in-house models: swe-grep and swe-grep-mini retrieval models, swe-1.5 (frontier-size, served by cerebras at up to 950 tok/s), swe-1.6 and swe-1.7, swe-2, swe-check (an rl bug-detection model built with applied compute), and the fusion harness running 'fable' and 'astra' in devin desktop and cli. performance claims are self-reported.
- 2026-02–cognition for government · activecognition for government — the gov offering launched february 2026; fedramp high (class d) in-process by july; an mou with the department of energy's genesis mission; the us army and navy named as devin customers at the series d.
- 2026-06–the productivity guarantee · activethe ai productivity guarantee — an in-house estimator converts devin's output to engineer-hours; if delivered value underperforms the price, cognition funds usage up to $10m. outcome-priced agent labor, self-measured — the quest that turns the labor analogy into contract language.
- 2026-07the security swarm · continuingthe security quest — devin security swarm plus a vulnerability remediation program, shipped early july 2026 as the agent's mandate widened from writing code to defending it.
- 2026-01–the global offices · continuingthe geographic build-out — london office (first in europe) with cognizant in january; cognition japan under takumi masai in april; a singapore apac base under richard spence; infosys and ltm partnerships reaching hundreds of enterprise clients.
- 2026-07tierzero and poke · endedthe acqui-hire shelf — tierzero and the interaction company (makers of poke) absorbed in july 2026, extending the pattern the windsurf deal set: buy the team, keep the product surface.
- 2026-09factoring rsa-260 · endedfactoring rsa-260 — a research post where devin plus a researcher built a top gpu lattice siever and factored the rsa-260 challenge number. the 'agents do research' proof point, shipped the day after the series e.
- 2024–devin builds devin · continuingthe dogfooding loop — 'how cognition uses devin to build devin' (february 2026) plus the escalating internal-code claims: ~25% of prs in early 2025, 13% of production code at some earlier point, >89–95% by mid-2026. the self-reported numbers the valuation slides are built on.
the ecosystem
- 2024-03-13–openhands · continuingopenhands (né opendevin) — the open-source replication created one day after the launch, now ~85k stars: the community's standing answer to a demo it couldn't inspect, and the control group for every 'devin is fake' cycle.
- 2025-07–the diaspora · continuingthe diaspora — windsurf founders varun mohan and douglas chen to google deepmind; neal wu, scott's brother and a founding advisor, to mira murati's thinking machines lab in february 2026; the windsurf rank-and-file absorbed, bought out, or retained under a six-day culture memo. where the people went is its own record.
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.