Scott Wu
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Scott Wu is an American entrepreneur and competitive programmer who is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Cognition AI, the startup behind Devin, an autonomous coding agent marketed as an "AI software engineer." [1][2] Before founding Cognition in 2023, Wu was one of the most decorated competitive programmers the United States has produced, winning three gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and finishing first overall in 2014. [3][4] He earlier co-founded the networking startup Lunchclub. [1]
Wu is best known for leading Cognition, which he started in 2023 alongside Steven Hao and Walden Yan, all three former IOI gold medalists. [1][5] The company introduced Devin in March 2024, presenting it as a fully autonomous agent that can plan and complete software-engineering tasks rather than merely autocomplete code. [2] Under Wu, Cognition acquired the AI coding tool Windsurf in July 2025 and reached a valuation of about 26 billion dollars in a funding round announced in May 2026, making it one of the most valuable startups in the AI coding sector. [6][7] Wu has publicly resisted framing Devin as a replacement for human programmers, describing it instead as a collaborator that handles routine work. [8]
Wu was born in 1997 in Louisiana to a Chinese immigrant family and grew up in Baton Rouge. [1] He showed an early aptitude for mathematics and programming, taking part in his first math competition in second grade and beginning to code at around age twelve. [11] As a teenager he became a standout in national academic competitions. In 2011, while an eighth grader at Glasgow Middle School in Baton Rouge, he won the individual title at the Raytheon MATHCOUNTS National Competition, clinching the championship in the Countdown Round, a head-to-head format contested among the top finishers, at the event held in Washington, D.C., on May 6, 2011. [12] He later attended Baton Rouge Magnet High School. [1]
Wu went on to represent the United States at the IOI three consecutive years, taking gold each time. His official IOI record shows gold in 2012, when he ranked 22nd out of 310 contestants with 376 points; gold in 2013, when he ranked 5th out of 299 with 554 points; and gold in 2014, when he placed first overall out of 311 contestants with a perfect score of 600 points. [3][4] He has been described as one of the strongest American IOI competitors of all time. [3] On the online judge Codeforces, Wu reached Legendary Grandmaster, the platform's highest rating tier, with a peak rating around 3350, and he competed under the handle "scott_wu" across Codeforces and Topcoder. [1] His other competitive results include a third-place finish at the 2017 Topcoder Open algorithm track, a win at the 2014 Harvard-MIT Mathematics Tournament, and Putnam Competition honorable mentions in 2015 and 2016. [1]
His older brother, Neal Wu, was also an elite competitive programmer who won three IOI gold medals, reached Legendary Grandmaster on Codeforces with a peak rating of 3147, and worked at companies including Facebook (now Meta) and Google Brain before joining Cognition. [1]
Wu attended Harvard University for roughly two years before leaving without completing a degree. [1] While an undergraduate, he competed for Harvard's team at the 2016 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals, held in Phuket, Thailand, where the team won a gold medal and finished third overall. [1] He later placed third in Google Code Jam 2021. [1]
After his time at Harvard, Wu worked as a software engineer at the financial-technology firm Addepar from 2014 to 2015, an experience he has credited with showing him how programming is applied in industry. [1][11] In 2017 he co-founded Lunchclub with Vladimir Novakovski and others, serving as its chief technology officer until 2022. [1] Lunchclub was an AI-driven networking platform that used machine learning to match professionals for one-on-one introductions based on their interests and goals. [13] The company raised about 4 million dollars in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and went on to close a roughly 24 million dollar Series A led by Coatue Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners in 2020, reaching a valuation above 100 million dollars. [13] Wu was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2020. [1]
Wu co-founded Cognition AI in 2023 with Steven Hao and Walden Yan, taking the role of chief executive officer. [1][5] The three founders shared a background in elite competitive programming, having each won IOI gold medals, and built the company around the goal of automating software engineering. [5] Cognition is based in San Francisco. [5]
The company raised an early round of about 21 million dollars led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. [1][5] As demand for AI coding agents grew, Cognition's valuation rose sharply over the following two years. [6][7]
Cognition's flagship product is Devin, unveiled in March 2024 and described by the company as the world's first autonomous AI software engineer. [2] Rather than functioning as an in-editor autocomplete tool, Devin is designed to take on engineering tasks end to end, planning work, writing and running code, and iterating toward a goal; users interact with it through tools such as Slack, Linear, and GitHub, much as they would with a remote engineer. [2][8] Wu has said Devin operates at roughly the level of a junior to mid-level engineer. [8]
In April 2025 the company released Devin 2.0, which introduced an agent-native cloud development environment combining a code editor, terminal, sandboxed browser, and planning tools, and cut the entry price from 500 dollars to 20 dollars per month. [14] The release added features the company calls Interactive Planning, in which Devin explores a codebase and proposes a plan a user can edit or approve before work begins; Devin Search, which answers questions about a codebase with cited code; and Devin Wiki, an automatically generated documentation layer. [14] Cognition said Devin 2.0 completed more than 80 percent more junior-level tasks per unit of compute than the prior version on internal benchmarks. [14]
Cognition has used Devin extensively on its own codebase. By 2026, Wu reported that roughly 89 to 90 percent of the code committed by the company's engineers was written by Devin, with most of the remainder produced by local agents in Windsurf. [7][8] Wu has consistently rejected the idea that the product is meant to replace human developers, saying the company has "never thought about it as replacing humans" and positioning Devin as a tool that frees engineers from maintenance work to focus on more creative tasks. [8] Cognition's customer base has grown to include large enterprises such as Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, Citi, Dell, and Santander, the U.S. space agency NASA, and several U.S. government and defense organizations. [7]
On July 14, 2025, Wu announced that Cognition had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf, an agentic integrated development environment. [9] The deal included Windsurf's intellectual property, product, trademark, and brand, along with its engineering, product, and go-to-market teams. [9] At the time of the acquisition, Windsurf was generating about 82 million dollars in annual recurring revenue, with more than 350 enterprise customers and hundreds of thousands of daily active users. [9]
The acquisition followed an unusual sequence of events. OpenAI had reportedly pursued Windsurf earlier in 2025, but that deal collapsed, after which Google hired Windsurf's co-founder and chief executive Varun Mohan and several colleagues in a licensing-and-compensation arrangement valued at about 2.4 billion dollars. [10] Cognition then stepped in to acquire what remained of the company. [10] In his internal memo, Wu stressed that "100% of Windsurf employees will participate financially in this deal" and that vesting cliffs would be waived and vesting accelerated for their work to date. [9]
Wu remains chief executive of Cognition. [7] In September 2025, two months after the Windsurf acquisition, the company raised 400 million dollars at a post-money valuation of 10.2 billion dollars. [6] On May 27, 2026, Cognition announced a Series D round of more than 1 billion dollars at a 25 billion dollar pre-money valuation, or about 26 billion dollars post-money, co-led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC, with Founders Fund, Ribbit Capital, Atreides, and other existing investors participating. [7] The company reported an annualized revenue run-rate of about 492 million dollars at the time of the round, up from roughly 37 million dollars a year earlier, and said enterprise usage of Devin had grown about 50 percent month over month for the preceding six months. [7] Under Wu, Cognition has become one of the most valuable companies in the AI coding tools market, competing with offerings such as Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, and Google's Jules. [7]
The table below summarizes major milestones in Wu's career and at Cognition.
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2011 | Won the individual MATHCOUNTS national championship as an eighth grader [12] |
| 2012, 2013, 2014 | Won IOI gold medals for the United States; first overall with a perfect score in 2014 [3][4] |
| 2014 to 2015 | Worked as a software engineer at Addepar [1] |
| 2016 | Competed for Harvard at the ICPC World Finals; team won gold, third overall [1] |
| 2017 | Co-founded Lunchclub; served as CTO until 2022 [1] |
| 2020 | Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list [1] |
| 2023 | Co-founded Cognition AI as CEO with Steven Hao and Walden Yan [1][5] |
| March 2024 | Cognition launched Devin, billed as the first AI software engineer [2] |
| April 2025 | Cognition released Devin 2.0 and cut the price to 20 dollars per month [14] |
| July 2025 | Cognition acquired Windsurf [9] |
| September 2025 | Cognition raised 400 million dollars at a 10.2 billion dollar valuation [6] |
| May 2026 | Cognition raised more than 1 billion dollars at about a 26 billion dollar valuation [7] |