Cognition, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) lab, is expanding in London to serve UK enterprises adopting AI software engineering.
Its UK team has grown by more than 200% in six months, and the London hub will support operations across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), the company said.
“The UK is one of the world’s most important technology and financial services markets and we’re seeing significant demand from organizations ready to put AI software engineering to work,” said Russell Kaplan, co-founder and president at Cognition. “This is a long-term investment for Cognition. We want London to become a major hub for our growth across the UK and EMEA.”
Founded in 2023, Cognition developed Devin, an autonomous AI agent that plans, writes, tests and deploys code.
Narry Singh has joined as Senior Managing Director. He most recently served as global co-head of digital at AlixPartners and previously as global head of growth and strategy at Accenture Digital. He is also a former non-executive director of the London Stock Exchange.
Cognition said Singh will work with chief executives, finance chiefs, and boards to build the business case for AI software engineering, put it to use responsibly across enterprises, and manage the workforce and operating-model changes that follow.
Aman Thind has joined as field chief technology officer (CTO) for financial services. He was previously managing director and global head of technology strategy and architecture at JPMorgan Chase, and chief architect at State Street, where he led the firm’s AI, cloud and digital asset strategy.
He also co-founded BestX, a fintech State Street acquired in 2018.
Thind will partner with chief information officers, CTOs and engineering leaders to bring AI agents into software development and support Cognition’s banking and financial services customers globally, the company said.
In the UK, The Access Group, a business software provider, has deployed Devin to more than 2,000 engineers. Cognition said the rollout contributed to a fivefold increase in merged pull requests and sped up some legacy software migration tasks by up to 480 times.
Across Europe, Cognition recently partnered with McKinsey & Company to help enterprises scale AI-powered software development and get more return from their AI spending.
Rival coding platform Cursor announced a London headquarters in June, saying its EMEA revenue had tripled quarter over quarter.
Cognition is widening how enterprises can access its tools. In September, it signed a multi-year collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help companies speed up cloud modernization, clear security and engineering backlogs, and run autonomous software engineering inside existing AWS environments.
Backed by a September round that raised more than $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation, Cognition plans to keep growing its London team as it chases enterprise demand.