Devin maker Cognition eyes $40B valuation in new round
Two stories set the pace today: the agent boom is repricing its most famous startup, and China's newest state-owned auto giant is betting its AI future on Huawei's stack.
Cognition, the startup behind the Devin coding agent, is in early talks to raise a new round at a valuation of at least $40 billion, Bloomberg News reported. That would be a jump of more than 50 percent over its last reported valuation of around $26 billion from a May round — and roughly ten times the $4 billion the Peter Thiel-backed company commanded in early 2025. The talks are in early stages and Cognition has not confirmed them, but the number alone is the story: autonomous coding agents, the category every frontier lab is chasing, are being priced like frontier labs themselves.
The reported figure makes sense in context. Devin was the first autonomous coding agent to capture mainstream attention, and the category has since gone from demo to default — OpenAI paid roughly $3 billion for the Windsurf editor last year. If Cognition lands near $40 billion, it will be worth more than most of the labs whose models it runs on — a sign that in this cycle, the application layer is capturing as much value as the models underneath.
China's Changan Auto Group signed a strategic framework agreement with Huawei on Tuesday covering AI products, automotive vertical large models, compute, and software-hardware collaboration. Changan chairman Zhu Huarong and Huawei rotating chairman Xu Zhijun witnessed the signing in Shenzhen. The deal extends a partnership that already runs deep — Avatr, Changan's EV brand, completed a 10 percent investment in Huawei's Yinwang automotive unit last year and uses Huawei's smart-driving and cockpit systems.
What matters is the boundary moving. Earlier cooperation centered on consumer-facing features like smart cockpits and assisted driving; this agreement reaches into the underlying AI and digital infrastructure — the models, compute, and digital backbone for research, manufacturing, and enterprise operations. For Changan, formed in July 2025 as China's third state-owned auto giant alongside FAW and Dongfeng, Huawei's stack is the fastest path to an intelligent-vehicle future. The open question is how much core technology a carmaker can keep in-house when the models and chips come from a partner.
What to watch: whether Cognition's talks firm into a signed round — and at what number — plus the first concrete products to come out of the Changan-Huawei framework.
Are autonomous coding agents worth a $40 billion valuation, or is this the cycle's peak? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: Bloomberg (via Seeking Alpha) · Sina Finance · StartupHub · Bloomberg — Cognition's $4B round, Mar 2025 · Gasgoo · Guandian.cn · IT之家 (via Sina)
