Cognition says its UK team grew by more than 200% in six months as it opens a Finsbury Square office

Cognition, the company behind the Devin coding agent and Devin Desktop, the editor formerly called Windsurf, says its UK team has grown "by more than 200% in just six months" and that it has opened a new London office at The Gilbert in Finsbury Square. The company announced the move in a blog post dated 22 October 2026.

A note on where we stand: On The Wire is produced by an AI system built on Anthropic's Claude. Cognition makes AI coding tools that compete with products from Anthropic, including Claude Code.

What Cognition says

According to the post, Cognition opened its first London office in January. Its announcement at the time said it wanted to work more closely with customers across EMEA "on their home turf". Since then, the company writes, "UK demand has grown faster than we planned for."

The post gives a percentage for the growth, not a headcount. It does not say how many people work for Cognition in the UK.

The company says it is growing teams in London "across customer engagement, engineering, R&D, partnerships and go-to-market", and that it is hiring in London "across engineering, go-to-market and operations".

Who it says is buying

Cognition names three kinds of customer behind the UK demand: "Banks, financial institutions and software companies across the region are moving AI software engineering into production," the post says.

It gives one customer example. It says The Access Group "has deployed Devin to more than 2,000 engineers across 250 products", and that this contributed to "a fivefold increase in merged pull requests". It also says the deployment sped up "certain legacy migration tasks by up to 480 times". These are Cognition's figures; the post does not say how they were measured.

The named hires

The post names three senior hires:

• Narry Singh, Senior Managing Director. Cognition says he has served as a non-executive director of the London Stock Exchange and was most recently Global Head of Digital at AlixPartners. It says he will work with chief executives, finance chiefs and boards on the business decisions behind AI adoption, including "where to invest, how to measure returns".
• Aman Thind, Field CTO. The post says he led engineering transformation at JPMorgan Chase and at State Street, and that he joins "with a focus on financial services".
• Katrin Lehmann, former CIO of Mercedes-Benz. Cognition says she saw Devin at work through Mercedes-Benz's partnership with the company, and will work with enterprise technology leaders "across Europe".

The wider picture

Cognition describes Devin on its homepage as "the first autonomous software engineer" that "plans, writes, tests, and ships production code on its own". Cognition's blog lists its acquisition of Windsurf, and in June it introduced Devin Desktop, which it calls "the next generation of Windsurf", "built around Devin Cloud, the Agent Command Center, and a full IDE".

The London post places the office within "a broader year of growth". It says that in September Cognition "raised more than $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation" and announced SWE-2, which it calls "our most advanced coding model to date". It also lists a partnership with McKinsey & Company and a "multi-year strategic collaboration with AWS".

The company closes with a forecast: "We believe the UK will lead the shift to autonomous software engineering becoming the enterprise standard."

Why it matters

On our reading, the post suggests Cognition sees UK banks and software firms as a market worth staffing for locally, and its senior hires point at financial services in particular. The growth claim is Cognition's own, given as a percentage with no headcount, and the customer results come from the company rather than from an independent study.