Peter Thiel-backed AI company Cognition establishes Irish presence

Peter Thiel-backed artificial intelligence (AI) company Cognition has established a presence in Ireland, with its new Dublin subsidiary made data controller for users of its coding platform, Devin.

The San Francisco-headquartered company, recently valued at $48 billion (€42.81 billion), was set up in 2023 by Scott Wu, Steven Hao and Walden Yan. In January, the company opened a London office to lead its European expansion.

The tech firm has no staff or office in Ireland at present. When asked by The Irish Times if it has plans to open an Irish office, the company did not respond.

Cognition Ai Labs Ireland Limited, which has listed the AI company’s head of operations Emily Cohen and head of legal Paul Grewal as directors, was set up in late October.

Following its establishment, the company updated its privacy policy to state the Irish company is the controller of the personal information for European users of Devin, the company’s flagship product launched in 2024.

Cognition is the latest in a string of large AI companies to establish a presence in Ireland.

British Ambassador to Ireland Kara Owen on current Anglo-Irish relations, trade opportunities, and the possibility of a Brexit reversal

Listen |

39:03

Anthropic, which created Claude, said in March it planned to create 200 jobs in the Republic by the end of next year. This year, across two announcements, ChatGPT maker OpenAI said it has plans to add 450 new staff at its European headquarters in Dublin.

Earlier this year, Harvey, the California headquartered firm providing AI tools for the legal sector valued at $15.5 billion, opened an office in Dublin and confirmed plans to add 40 new staff.

Cognition has described Devin as an “AI software engineer” that can write and debug code autonomously. It has said Devin is used by some of the world’s biggest companies, including semiconductor firm Nvidia, aviation company GE Aerospace and financial services firm Citi.

In September, Bloomberg reported the company was on track to hit $1 billion in annualised revenue.

The company has completed two big funding rounds this year, first raising $1 billion in May and then a further $2 billion in a Series E funding in September.

The latest funding round was led by new investors Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. Previous backers, including Thiel’s Founders Fund, General Catalyst and Avenir also contributed to the round.

Following the Series E round, the value of the company almost doubled from $26 billion in May to $48 billion.