Good Morning,
Visions of AI is a new feature format I’m experimenting with that will amount to a short profile on an AI or emerging tech startup. The cadence of this style of article is unknown as of yet, but there are a lot of fascinating startups I want to share about.
This is designed to be light evening reading to go out at a time-slot of 8 pm EST.
Generative AI has been a force of nature when it comes to the future of software engineering and building products. Cognition, maker of the AI coding agent Devin are in talks to raise at a valuation of $40 Billion.
Devin belongs in the same category as the likes of Cursor, Manus AI and other coding tools that have changed the future of software engineering, agentic AI augmented productivity and automating repetitive coding tasks to the extent that Anthropic models have gotten progressively better at coding. If Anthropic’s ARR is nearing $65 bn that’s due to the utility of its coding models and the success of its API.
Fast forward to the later half of 2026, Cursor is part of SpaceXAI, Meta’s acquisition of Manus AI has been blocked, and it’s now almost two years since Devin was first released. I’ll admit I was fairly skeptical of Devin and Cognition AI at the onset. A single stat line changed my mind.
Cognition is now reporting at least a $40 billion valuation based on achieving a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate, according to sources cited by Bloomberg. While we are living in an era of higher valuations for private AI related companies, not many AI startups have achieved $1 Billion ARR in under two years.
I was incredibly bullish on Cursor before SpaceX swooped in and now with Stripe likely acquiring OpenRouter, the consolidation period appears to be in full-swing. How much revenue would Manus AI even be making if it hadn’t taken the early big deal with Meta? In the mid 2020s so much of an AI startup’s fortunes seem to be tied to the pedigree of their investors and Venture Capital funds.
You might remember in July, 2025 Cognition acquired AI coding startup Windsurf, days after that company lost its CEO and other employees to Google. OpenAI’s incompetence has ironically benefitted Cognition since it was OpenAI that has reached a tentative deal to acquire Windsurf in a $3 bn. deal but the deal got vetoed apparently by Microsoft, since it would compete with Github Copilot.
