Cognition opens London office as UK team grows 200% in six months

Cognition, the developer of the autonomous engineer Devin, has opened a new office in London, in The Gilbert building on Finsbury Square. Over six months, the company's UK team has grown by more than 200%. Its first London office opened in January, when Cognition said it was working with European clients on their home turf. Demand has exceeded expectations: banks, financial institutions, and software companies in the region are moving AI development from pilots into production.

Nine out of ten Access Group metrics are about speed

The main case the company is highlighting is Access Group. The British software company has deployed Devin to more than 2000 engineers across 250 products. According to Cognition, the number of merged pull requests has grown fivefold, and some legacy code migration tasks have sped up by as much as 480x.

Read the second figure with care: "up to 480x" is a ceiling for specific types of tasks, not an average gain across all development. Still, migrations, refactoring, and dependency updates are widely seen as the area where agents deliver the most tangible benefit: there is a lot of work, it is repetitive, and tests can verify the result.

Key figures from the announcement:

• UK team growth: more than 200% in six months;
• Access Group: 2000+ engineers, 250 products;
• growth in merged pull requests: 5x;
• speedup of some legacy migrations: up to 480x;
• September round: more than $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation.

Who Cognition is putting across the table from CFOs and CIOs

Alongside the office, the company announced three appointments. None of them is aimed at code; all are aimed at conversations with client leadership.

Narry Singh, senior managing director, is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with two unicorn exits behind him. He served as an independent director of the London Stock Exchange, then led the digital practice at AlixPartners, and before that headed growth and strategy at Accenture Digital. At Cognition, he will work with CEOs, CFOs, and boards on questions of "where to invest, how to measure returns, and how to restructure the organization for AI development."

Aman Tind, Field CTO, previously led technology strategy and architecture at JPMorgan Chase, and before that was chief architect at State Street. His focus is the financial sector: the security and resilience requirements that shape every decision in a regulated environment.

Katrin Lehmann is a former global CIO of Mercedes-Benz. She saw Devin in action inside a large engineering organization through the carmaker's partnership with Cognition, and she will now help technology chiefs across Europe scale autonomous development.

London as part of a bigger year

The office fits into a broader picture. In September, Cognition raised more than $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation and introduced SWE-2, its strongest coding model. Its sales channels are expanding in parallel: a strategic multi-year collaboration with AWS, availability in AWS Marketplace and the Databricks ecosystem, and a recent partnership with McKinsey & Company. The company states outright that the UK will lead the shift to autonomous development as an enterprise standard, and it is opening roles in engineering, go-to-market, and operations.

The hiring says more about strategy than the office itself. Cognition is selling not just access to an agent but a consulting layer around it: the business case, ROI metrics, compliance. In banking and the auto industry, these are what most often slow adoption.

What practitioners can take from this

If you are responsible for an engineering organization, take the methodology from the Access Group case, not the headline numbers. Start with migrations and refactoring, where gains are easiest to measure and to verify with tests. Count not the number of pull requests but the share of merged changes and review time; otherwise a rising metric can hide a growing load on reviewers. In regulated industries, bring in security and architecture early, as Tind does. And when choosing a vendor, check whether it has people who can talk to a board in the language of economics, not only to a team in the language of code.