AI TRENDS | Cognition Revenue Surges, but Cash Burn Remains Heavy

Cognition’s annualized revenue is about $900 million, more than triple its level at the start of this year, according to people familiar with the matter. According to Sina Finance, the AI coding assistant developer is also seeking a new funding round that could value it at $45 billion. People familiar with the company said Cognition’s management expects annualized revenue to exceed $1.5 billion by year-end and reach $4 billion to $5 billion next year. The company’s cash burn this year could reach $800 million, and second-quarter cash consumption was about $200 million. Cognition’s enterprise gross margin is close to 50%, excluding model training costs, while its free cash flow is already near breakeven if self-developed coding model development costs are excluded. The company said about 50 enterprise customers pay more than $1 million a year, and one unnamed customer accounts for about 10% of revenue. The report also said Higgsfield’s annualized revenue topped $700 million this month, Perplexity’s reached at least $750 million this year, Manus has surpassed $400 million since late last year, and OpenEvidence’s annualized revenue has exceeded $300 million. According to The Information’s estimates, Anthropic and OpenAI together account for 89% of the market, up 4.5 percentage points from nine months ago.