Business 4 min read By Callum Montgomery
Robinhood Ventures Invests $10m in AI Coding Startup Cognition
Robinhood Ventures has taken a $10 million stake in Cognition, the maker of AI coding tool Devin, as part of the startup's $2 billion Series E round. The investment follows Robinhood's $75 million backing of OpenAI in April, with the venture arm's head saying the AI coding market is not winner-take-all.
Robinhood Ventures has invested $10 million in Cognition, the artificial intelligence startup behind the coding tool Devin, adding a second major bet in the rapidly growing market for AI-assisted software development. The investment formed part of Cognition's Series E funding round in September, which raised more than $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation.
The venture arm of the US trading platform is disclosing its participation for the first time, joining backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Accel and Founders Fund. The move follows Robinhood's $75 million investment in OpenAI in April, meaning the company now has money riding on two competitors in the AI coding space.
Sarah Pinto, head of Robinhood Ventures, said backing rival companies was a deliberate strategy rather than a contradiction. «It's not a winner-take-all market,» she said, noting that Robinhood's own engineers use multiple AI coding tools. Within its consumer business, the company also lets customers choose between different AI models to run its trading agents.
Cognition's Devin competes with OpenAI's Codex, Anthropic's Claude Code and GitHub Copilot for the attention of software developers. The startup said in September that its annualised revenue run rate had reached almost $900 million, up from $492 million in May, underlining the pace of demand for tools that can write and debug code.
Pinto said the decision to invest was not driven solely by market opportunity or Cognition's growth. She first met cofounder and chief executive Scott Wu in 2024, before joining Robinhood, and was struck by his conviction about where AI was heading. Even as the technology and the market evolved, Wu's «vision really never changed», she said, describing that as «pretty extraordinary».
«It's all about who are the leaders of these companies and do we think that they are these legendary A-plus teams that can bend the future to their will,» Pinto said. «Scott is very much that.» Cognition's cofounders also include Steven Hao, Walden Yan and Russell Kaplan.
The investment is held through Robinhood Ventures Fund I, a publicly traded closed-end fund that began trading in March and gives everyday investors exposure to private companies. Its holdings include Databricks, Revolut and ElevenLabs, among others. Investors can buy and sell shares of the fund on the stock exchange rather than having to secure a direct stake in those businesses.
Robinhood said the fund's net asset value, the estimated value of its investments minus liabilities, jumped about 17% for the quarter ended 30 September, its biggest quarterly increase to date. The disclosure highlights how listed vehicles are being used to widen access to fast-growing private technology companies that were previously available only to a narrow group of investors.
Pinto said getting exposure to private assets can be difficult even for accredited investors, often depending on connections, who can write the largest cheques and a willingness to tie up money for years. «That just doesn't work for most people, which means that most people have to completely give up on the idea of essentially owning a piece of the most innovative companies and where a lot of the wealth creation is happening,» she said.
The Cognition deal extends a busy period for Robinhood's venture strategy, which is using a publicly listed fund to channel retail money into some of the most highly valued private companies in technology. For Cognition, the backing adds a prominent consumer-facing investor to a cap table already populated by established venture firms, as competition in AI coding intensifies.
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