Cognition hires Art Levy as VP of Global Partnerships, targets one acquisition per week as it scales Devin worldwide

Cognition AI eyes one acquisition per week as it hits 97 founders on staff

Art Levy, former Chief Business Officer at Brex (employee #30), has joined Cognition AI as VP of Global Partnerships. Russell Kaplan, Cognition's president, frames the hire as a signal of where Cognition is heading: less a pure AI lab, more an applied agent company trying to embed Devin deeply into enterprise technology stacks.

The partnership model Levy describes goes well beyond a standard sales motion. A "global partnership" means co-selling, co-marketing, potential investment, product integration, and joint go-to-market with the partner's own customers. The pitch is that Devin is designed to join a company's existing toolchain rather than replace it, which makes channel relationships central to distribution.

“We have today in Cognition, 97 former founders working in the company. And we are aspiring for Apple hiring. One team a week probably right now. Oh. So if you're a Trump value team and you want to be part of rocket ship, get in touch. We kind of learned it trial by fire acquiring Windsurf in the course of a weekend as a company that was four times our size from first call to executed reading from Friday night to Monday morning.”

M&A pace

Cognition currently has 97 former founders on staff and is targeting roughly one team acquisition per week. Kaplan says the company learned M&A "trial by fire" when it acquired Windsurf over a single weekend, from first call Friday night to signed deal Monday morning, despite Windsurf being roughly four times Cognition's size at the time. Levy's specific role includes leveling up that process and making Cognition the most attractive acquihire destination in the market.

Levy adds that partnerships often serve as a "try before you buy" filter. Companies that build integrations with Cognition and start winning customers together sometimes become acquisition targets once the culture fit is established.

Enterprise adoption gap

Kaplan is candid about the mismatch between AI capability progress and enterprise readiness. Even fast-moving tech companies are asking whether they need to rethink their entire organizational structure now. His read is that even if AI capabilities froze today, there is at least a decade of deployment and operationalization work ahead for the enterprise world.

One customer story illustrates how wide that gap is. A Global 2000 company with tens of thousands of engineers deployed Devin across its product management organization. The PMs used Devin to take customer requests, prototype fixes, then have Devin summarize the fix into a Jira ticket, and then deleted all the code. When Cognition asked why they weren't shipping the working prototype, the PM said it wasn't her job — she was in the product org, not engineering. The story is Kaplan's clearest argument that organizational structure, not capability, is the real bottleneck.

Model selection and cost

On the question of whether enterprises are pulling back on AI spend, Kaplan says it's more nuanced than a simple cost-cutting story. Companies are asking whether they need frontier models for every workload, and the answer increasingly is no. But for specific, high-stakes tasks, model choice still matters. He cites OpenAI models as currently best-in-class for security vulnerability recall, while Anthropic models may have an edge on precision. Enterprises are starting to mix and match rather than standardize on one provider.

Japan

Japan is Cognition's top international market, and the traction there predates any formal push. From the moment Devin became available self-serve, Japanese adoption was disproportionately high. Kaplan attributes this partly to the quality of Japanese user feedback: every support ticket arrives as a detailed debugging essay, which means the issues that do get escalated are real bugs. Levy adds that channel partners in Japan have also been the most effective at selling Devin through to their own customer bases. The Japanese user community independently settled on calling Devin "Devin-kun" — the honorific for a friend or sidekick — without any prompt from Cognition.