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Zhidong reported on April 25 that according to an investor who had read the terms of the deal, the venture capital company Founders Fund took the lead in investing $175 million in Cognition, a startup that was only 6 months old. The latter recently launched an AI programming assistant called Devin, marking a new phase in the development of AI technology.
The venture capital firm values the startup at $2 billion, including new investments, the investor said.
Just a month ago, Founders Fund led the startup's Series A funding round at a valuation of $350 million, according to PitchBook data.
1. To develop the first AI programmer, Cognition raised money to seek a $2 billion valuation
In March of this year, startup Cognition launched Devin, the world's first AI programmer. It is reported that Devin has a variety of capabilities, including full-stack skills, self-learning new technologies, building and deploying applications, finding and fixing bugs autonomously, training and fine-tuning his own AI models, etc. In the SWE-bench benchmark, Devin was able to correctly handle 13.86 times more questions than GPT-4.
As soon as Devin was released, it quickly sparked a lot of discussion on the social media platform X. Observers point out that there are glaring inconsistencies in the company's presentation, and that Cognition may have exaggerated publicity.
Some netizens even pointed out that Devin can't actually complete Upwork's work independently, and its birth is more about marketing and hype than reality.
However, despite its early missteps, the AI programming startup managed to attract successive investments from multiple investors and boost its valuation to $2 billion.
Cognition's funding is the latest example of an AI startup raising money at sky-high valuations with little to no revenue.
Such deals have even attracted venture capital firms like Founders Fund. These companies have said they are shying away from most AI investments due to increased competition and exorbitant valuations.
Second, startups have emerged one after another, and the competition for AI software engineers is heating up
Cognition is just one of many companies that utilize AI to assist software engineers. In fact, almost every tech giant has launched its own version of an AI coding assistant.
In June 2021, GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI launched Copilot, an AI code assistant based on GPT-3, and as of February this year, it has more than 1.3 million paid individual users and 50,000 enterprise users, making it the most established product to date.
In addition, startups such as Magic, Replit, and Codeium also offer their own AI coding assistants. It is understood that the start-up Magic designed its own model and underlying technology from scratch to build a "superhuman software engineer", which has raised more than $100 million.
Igor Ostrovsky, a software developer at Microsoft, believes that in the near future, developers will be integrating AI into their workflows.
Therefore, Ostrovsky decided to build an AI coding platform that he himself would like to use. This platform is Augment. It is reported that on Wednesday, Augment received $252 million in financing at a post-investment valuation close to that of a unicorn ($977 million).
3. From suggestion to auto-completion, intelligent coding allows developers to upgrade their efficiency
Existing tools make suggestions for developers to use as they enter code, while Devin, Magic, and others are designed to efficiently automate the work of human engineers.
Github says it plans to release a coding "agent" next year that can check for problems in existing computer code, suggest fixes, and automatically write and run code.
In addition, Github notes that all coding tools will rely on the same conversational AI that also powers text chatbots like ChatGPT.
Conclusion: The cooling trend is beginning to take shape, and the financing miracle of Cognition may not be repeated
With the advent of the era of AI-assisted software development, the development of fully automated AI software engineers is at a critical juncture, and Devin is a typical representative of this trend.
Devin applies advanced AI algorithms to understand and execute tasks related to software engineering by combining human expertise with machine intelligence. This not only streamlines the workflow of engineers, but also increases the productivity of developers and accelerates the pace of innovation. It is also a milestone in the field of software engineering.
However, the "2023 State of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Industry Report" released by research institute CB Insights shows that in 2023, the total funding of global AI startups has fallen by 10% compared with 2022, and the number of financing transactions has hit a new low in the industry since 2017.
The cooling trend is beginning to take shape, which also leads to the question: for the AI startups of the future, can the financing miracle of Cognition be replicated?
来源：The Information