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

Morgan Chittum here. It seems like everyone in Silicon Valley wants to back the next big winner in AI coding. Robinhood Ventures is betting there’s room for more than one.

OpenAI’s Codex, Anthropic’s Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and Cognition’s Devin are all competing for attention from developers. Robinhood’s venture arm now has money riding on two of the companies behind them.

Robinhood Ventures has cut Cognition a check for $10 million, the company exclusively told Fortune, which follows a $75 million investment in OpenAI back in April.

Sarah Pinto, head of Robinhood Ventures, has no issue with backing rivals. “It’s not a winner-take-all market,” she said. Robinhood’s own engineers use multiple AI coding tools, she noted, adding that within its consumer business, Robinhood lets customers choose between different AI models to run its trading agents.

The Cognition investment was part of the startup’s Series E funding round in September, which raised more than $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation. Robinhood is disclosing its participation for the first time, joining high-profile backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and Founders Fund. Cognition said in September that its annualized revenue run rate had reached almost $900 million, up from $492 million in May. 

But it wasn’t just the market opportunity or Cognition’s rapid growth that sold Pinto. She first met cofounder and CEO Scott Wu in 2024, before she joined Robinhood, and was struck by his conviction about where AI was heading.

Even as the technology and the market evolved, Wu’s “vision really never changed,” she said, something she described as “pretty extraordinary.” She added, “It’s all about who are the leaders of these companies and do we think that they are these legendary A-plus teams that can bend the future to their will. Scott is very much that.” Cognition’s cofounders also include Steven Hao, Walden Yan, and Russell Kaplan.

The new investment is held through Robinhood Ventures Fund I, a publicly traded closed-end fund that began trading in March and gives everyday investors exposure to red-hot private companies. The holdings include Databricks, Revolut, and ElevenLabs, among others. Investors can buy and sell shares of the fund on the stock exchange, rather than having to secure a direct stake in those businesses. 

Robinhood also told Fortune that the fund’s net asset value (NAV), which is the estimated value of its investments, minus liabilities, jumped about 17% for the quarter ended September 30. That’s its biggest quarterly increase to date. 

Getting exposure to private assets can be difficult even for accredited investors, Pinto said. It often depends on connections, who can cut the largest checks, and a willingness to tie up money for years. “That just doesn’t work for most people, which means that most people have to completely give up on the idea of essentially owning a piece of the most innovative companies and where a lot of the wealth creation is happening,” she said.

See you Monday,

Morgan Chittum
X: @morgan_chittum
Email: [email protected]

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com