Robinhood bets $10 million on AI coding tool maker Cognition—after previously backing a rival

Robinhood Ventures has doubled down on AI coding tools by backing Cognition with $10 million, even as it already had money in OpenAI. The move is a neat little reminder that Silicon Valley’s favorite new obsession is crowded enough to make room for rivals — at least if you’re willing to spread your bets.

Cognition sits behind Devin, one of the names chasing developers alongside OpenAI’s Codex, Anthropic’s Claude Code and GitHub Copilot. Robinhood’s venture arm had already put $75 million into OpenAI in April. Sarah Pinto, who leads Robinhood Ventures, is comfortable with that overlap. She called the market “not a winner-take-all” business.

That’s not just a talking point. Pinto said Robinhood’s own engineers use multiple AI coding tools, and the company’s consumer business lets customers choose between different AI models for trading agents. Robinhood is also making public its Cognition stake for the first time through Robinhood Ventures Fund I, the publicly traded closed-end fund it started trading in March.

Cognition’s September Series E raised more than $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation. The company said at the time that its annualized revenue run rate had reached almost $900 million, up from $492 million in May. Robinhood joined a funding round that also included Andreessen Horowitz, Accel and Founders Fund.

Pinto said the investment was about more than growth and market size. She met Cognition cofounder and CEO Scott Wu in 2024, before joining Robinhood, and said his view of where AI was headed never changed, even as the technology kept moving. Robinhood’s fund, which also holds names including Databricks, Revolut and ElevenLabs, said its net asset value jumped about 17% for the quarter ended September 30, its biggest quarterly increase so far.