Cognition

No single number decides. Layers can disagree — that's the point. New to this? →

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  if someone had real insight into the business... and then they suddenly jumped to a competitor, that would be very, very different to me.

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  Gets what seems to be the greatest job offer.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  But if I was a CEO, I'd be pretty annoyed to see someone who had access to my plans go to a competitor.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  And Scott Wu was right. I want to bring it back to your question, Harry. The person who's going to win is going to be the person who compounds the most, grinds out the most software with these tools that have made them move incredibly quickly.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Remember when that went, what's his name? The CEO? Scott Wu. Yeah. When he hired Windsurf and fired after people, he's like, we have to, work seven days a week at our company.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  To me, the more interesting thing for Cognition is, like, you know, that it isn't in the top two or three, and it's still of that scale, right?... So Cognition is like the greatest. Now, Cognition is different. It's long-running. It's autonomous agents. It is different, okay? But from a revenue perspective, it's the Postmates of the category. But it's such a big category, man. You want to be in Postmates again. It's never going to catch Anthropic unless the world changes, which it has every sing

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Cognition raising around at $46 billion, reportedly. They will end the year at $1.6 billion in ARR, currently doing $800 to $900.

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  it just leaves room for a company like this to come in and take up some of that space in a way that I don't think we would have seen quite so strongly if cursor was still independent.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  it's a company I've heard of before and think of as sort of, you know, one of the leaders in the space while not also being kind of at the very top. ... It also makes sense that, you know, a bunch of investors would have piled on here.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  this valuation seems to signal that VCs still see room for multiple major players in the market of AI coding, which, you know, again, goes to this idea of can a new brand new startup, in this case, Cognition, relatively new, you know, break through when it seems like there is already, you know, major, dare say, legacy, which seems weird to say in the AI coding world, but legacy players that, you know, seem untouchable. And it seems like the VC community actually believes that there is room for n

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  the smart glasses that Apple is supposed to be working on... there's been reporting from Bloomberg that you know, that that's been pushed back a bit because Apple is trying to figure out, like, given that, again, you know, I think metas like Ray-Bans are both popular, but there's also like very, very significant backlash to them.

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  I ultimately think will be a limited thing that people forget about eventually.

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  I think this becomes a thing that Apple showed off and ultimately fades into the background

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  I also don't think it'll be very good... there is a palpable difference between your phone already always being ready to answer if you ask for the digital assistant and something that's actually like literally strapped to you.

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  I don't think this watch feature gets used all that much.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  there's a couple of audio intelligence features that really allow you to record all the time from your watch and create these AI summaries that will be generated automatically. Which, by the way, hilarious, because, you know, Apple also at the same time talks a lot about privacy. And we now are having to get used to this moment where not only are you going to be potentially videoed everywhere, but recorded everywhere as well.

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  I think what they really talk about is, hey, we've got a watch and you got a phone and we're going to embed our AI in it. You don't need another AI wearable like what OpenAI is, you know, reportedly working on.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  foldables, I think, is an acknowledgement from them, even as cool as it is, and I'm sure it will sell well. It is not likely going to be the ubiquitous product, hardware product that we see everyone using with, let's say, the iPhone or the iPod before, in part because not everyone wants something that large. And also, it's just very expensive.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  Growth, because email is like that. Now also all our digital marketing, our team received a report every morning from our AI agents suggesting what changes to do or not to do, and they approve or reject. And so also all our marketing businesses run, our growth is run by a few people right now.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  our engineers stopped coding around a year ago. Since then, they didn't code. What they have is hundreds of AI engineers that they code for them. And that is how we can achieve what we are achieving at scale in 35 countries, including China, including Middle East, including Europe, where there are a lot of regulations in all of them with a fairly tiny team.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I think with AI, the right companies will transform themselves in holdings. And so what it means is that whatever Sleep is doing today will be one of the businesses. That we do. But with AI, as we build tools for ourselves, we'll discover other opportunities, business opportunities. And so the Eight Sleep Inc. will probably own three, four, five, ten different businesses.

• bearish criticism Matteo Franceschetti

  God, we're getting eaten alive by OpenAI, Anthropic, Cognition, new name, these hot companies.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  The truth is, independent of probably what Anthropic did, there was probably going to be a bunch of LLM alternatives in China.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  But I think this is where his prime messaging has come back to bite him on the ass, because to Jason's point previously in episodes where he's so dogmatic about what it's going to do to jobs and employment. Now, when things do come out, it's tied to him, sometimes unfairly, just because he's had that stance because of his labeling before.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  And in fairness to the CEO of Anthropic, some of the most hyperbolic stuff he's not saying, but you have that pacing letter that a bunch of scientists signed. But there's a lot of hyperbole that's not coming from him. And he's a little more nuanced than what he is worried about.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  So either you think this is a manageable problem, in which case keep building, or you think it's not a manageable problem, in which case you probably should stop. But stop wringing your hands and saying, if only the rest of the world could stop me killing humanity, you're the CEO.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  What you're saying is you're building something you can't control. If you're building something that you can't control, then maybe you should stop building it, because you're the CEO,

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  if it's that bad, Dario, it's your effing job. Whether it's 10%, or if there's any material risk, your company is going to exterminate even a subset of humanity. That is your job. Your job is to fix it. Shut down the company if you can't, right?

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  My tactical view is Anthropik's going public. He is just, you know, in part because of the employee that worked there four weeks or eight weeks that said there's a 10% risk of destroying humanity, which many agreed with. But he's just getting ahead of a risk factor so that when the $2 trillion IPO happens, it's a non-issue.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I think they did a super clever job. And I think if they had started six months later, they might have ended up being the winner. I think the team is really, really talented there. And I'll be curious to see what they actually have in store for us next because I'm sure that, you know, now that they're a part of Cognition, they haven't stopped working on this.

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  I largely think they're bullshit. You know, we saw lovable. When I invested, everyone was like, oh, it's a rapper. It's a rapper, you idiot, Harry. And actually, it was a rapper. But it's about speed of decision making, product execution, and building value over time very, very, very fast. Instinct is a rapper. Of course it is. It's not that difficult to do an AI assistant today, which is why there's so many. But they're building incredibly quickly, very valuable features, and you build over tim

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  So in our space, there are definitely other companies like Adobe and Canva, who builds the best software for the pixel first era, where everything was defined with pixels. But that's clearly not how the world is going to work in the future. What we're envisioning, and that's what everyone wants, they want to just be able to search and really work through the library of assets and all the knowledge through natural interfaces. So being able to own this interface, and build the analytics, like this

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  And by going back to Higgs, why it's so important for Higgs field. There are so many systems today which are used for just to store assets, like some people use Dropbox, some people use Google Drive, some people are gonna try to use Miro, some people are gonna try to use frame.io, like there are many solutions. But let's think about what people need, what people need, they want to be able to search contents, and marketers especially want to make sure that content is on brands in terms of the vis

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I think it's complete bullshit. With the greatest of respects, it is a very deep functionality required to serve some of the biggest law firms in the world. Very, very deep and specific functionality. It's very specific according to the different types of law as well. Plus, if you want to sell into these law firms, it's a multi-year sales cycle with some of the stodgy old lawyers and partnerships. You can't just say, I'm OpenAI.

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. I believe, for example, recently OpenAI announced that they basically built OpenAI for law, but that's only V0. So over the time, they also are going to try to print smaller, specialized models for, not exactly smaller, but really specialized model for certain use cases.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  So from a period from March to June, everyone really moved to Claude, including the creative team. And then we started to see that all the coders quickly moved from Claude to Codex as of mid-June.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  Of course, because the agents are as good as context and rules, which they have. And if context and rules change pretty much twice a week, it gets a little difficult.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  But also very important, the way how Nick thinks about that is in terms of the playbooks. We launch products, new products pretty much every week. We have to keep up the agents with all the information and so on. And just due to the high velocity, having extremely smart coordinated team is very important.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Revolut has now over 92% resolution rate on customer support for consumers.

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  It's true that probably over 60% of customer support requests, especially the first line of defense, can be handled with AI. But when it especially comes to B2B, AI just doesn't work.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  a lot of benchmarks today for videos really text to video, which does not represent actual workflows at all. The way to think about video models today, it's just modern rendering engine... it's virtually impossible to really define a visual output and direct the execution just through text.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I really was thinking that chasing benchmarks is valuable. But I don't believe this is just sort of corporate psyops... they start to put test data into the training, they start to kind of use leverage test data to use LLM as a judge for training of the models, use all the various tricks to basically game benchmarks

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  logo retention month one was expected to be over 80%. So clearly we have a lot of work to do on user education to get there

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  there is quite massive drop within the first month, just simply because people don't fully realize the value. That's a core priority for us to actually get better in that.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  we have an in house team of over 150 creative professionals. It's almost half of the whole workforce, frankly. And those people, they make a product launch videos, they make tutorials. For example, we made the first AI generated movie... we open sourced all of it.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  NRR at month 12 is over 300%. It just never happens in B2B SaaS, right? So that's why I'm saying that while there is substantial churn in month zero, and we have to do a better job with user education to address that, expansion is unprecedented.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  we spent more than a year in a search of a product which could work.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  Everyone told us that camera control does not exist in AI. And camera control is so important to tell a story. So this is a very important bottleneck to solve.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  we released our products March 31st last year. And since then, we are really riding this crazy wave.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  We burned more than 10 million out of 16 million raised in seed fundraising. So we felt we have just one attempt left.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  beneath that AI label, the opportunity has broadened a lot, right? So enterprise apps, consumer apps, but also services, semiconductors, power, defense. A lot of the attention goes to open AI, SpaceX, AI, and Anthropic. But beyond that, our opportunity set has never been deeper and broader.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  AI related companies account for 86% of US VC deal activity in this 2026 snapshot up from 65% in 2025. So, you know, obviously AI has become the dominant destination for venture dollars.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  when there are transactions in secondary markets, the discount to the last round price is basically zero. Which just speaks to, you know, these, these valuations of which companies have raised that are fresh and there's always net new investors willing to pay that same price.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  participation in tenders struck by Carta has only been 58%. So this is employees choosing not to take liquidity because they have so much conviction in the performance of their business.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  the founder is the asset class at this point. And so the bet that we make and part of the reason that it's been a benefit for some of these companies to remain private is they can many times take bigger swings, um, in the private markets that have longer duration paybacks.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  the top six companies today, you know, Anthropik, OpenAI, Databricks, Stripe, Waymo, Revolut by last round valuation, they add up to about 2.4 trillion. This is more than the combined market cap of IPOs we've seen in the last 10 years, excluding SpaceX, which adds up to 1.7 trillion.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  many enterprises are really excited when they, you know, buy Cursor or Cognition for the first time. But the reality is that's just like the beginning of the journey. The runway from just procuring and trying these tools to like full adoption is massive.

• bullish assessment Delian Asparouhov

  with something like Devon, that, you know, sort of moat in the subways, there has been the sort of team and, you know, product they've been able to build before they'd really raised anything, right? Like, you know, that is just a fundamentally different group of, you know, sort of thinkers, you know, I know Scott Neil Wu, you know, sort of decently, you know, well, I was, you know, in audience when they were in seventh and eighth grade, you know, you know, winning math counts in front of everybo

• bullish assessment Delian Asparouhov

  the second investment after that is cognition labs with, you know, Devon, the, you know, basically only, you know, sort of truly functional AI agent, you know, to, you know, replace software engineers.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  we've seen players like cognition codium all hands come about

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  if people offer you money at a great valuation as an entrepreneur you take it as long as it doesn't come with non-traditional terms okay if it's clean terms and you're a good steward of capital and somebody wants to dump a bag on you you take the bag

• bullish endorsement David Friedberg

  make hay while the sun shines

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  i'm just confused why why why do they need this much money because cognition raised a half billion i think last year so yeah it's just i'm just confused why why why do they need this much money

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  i think these two rounds into two less brand name companies bringing together a billion dollars in capital shows that the ai push is not slowing down

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  cognition which bought windsurf recall that after the windsurf google deal happened there was a company left remaining they picked it up they just raised 500 million dollars

• mixed assessment David Sacks

  in the example that you gave, Jason, this new product was only at 13%. So there's still a long way to go, but the potential is clearly there. ... Devin is, I guess you could call it an agent-first approach, and I think that's very cool for generating new software projects.

• bullish endorsement Chamath Palihapitiya

  Oh, I think this is so powerful. I mean, it's incredible because we're measuring this progress in like, what, week over week? It feels like that. Yeah. I think the point that you should take away is that the most of these very difficult in, in, in penetrable job types for the average person. If you said to them, Hey, become a developer, that's like a complicated journey, right? It's just going to be now like a command line interface where you just kind of describe in English what you want to do.

1. 2024-04-08 series_a · $175M · Led by Founders Fund

VentureSignalScore 51/100 for cognition, composed from 2 of 4 components (emerging formula), discounted ×0.85 for 50% signal coverage