Steven Hao Co-founder and CTO of Cognition, the company behind the Devin coding agent; IOI gold medalist and early Scale AI engineer Founder · Capital · $1–10B cost 3 headwinds 1

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Founder · Capital · Artificial Intelligence · Software · Technology · $1–10B

Steven Hao

Co-founder and CTO of Cognition, the company behind the Devin coding agent; IOI gold medalist and early Scale AI engineer · b. 1996 · United States

class not establishedhousehold not establishedplace not established

Cognition Scale AI

Cost of failure 3 / 10

soft landingnothing to catch a fall

Headwinds 1 / 10

clear runagainst the current

Two calls made by hand, not formulas. how we score →

Summary

Hao is a competitive-programming gold medalist who studied math and computer science at MIT, worked as an early engineer at Scale AI, and co-founded Cognition in 2023 with two fellow olympiad winners.

Forbes put him at $5.8 billion in October 2026, a private stake. His childhood, family and the details of his own role are thinly documented, so this record is short.

Coded record

industryArtificial Intelligence · Software · Technology

talentexceptional

connectionswell-connected

outcome size$1–10B · band 5

path typeFounder · Capital

childhood householdtwo-parent

immigrant generationnone

educationcollege degree

credential fundingnone

startup capitalangel

took outside investmentyes

kept ownershipyes

public scrutinyjournalistic

ⓘ Hover any row for its definition.

Profiled colleagues

People in this set who share a company with Steven Hao.

Alexandr Wang 2/1 Scale AI

Subject cooperation: public-only · last reviewed 2026-10-20

Where they worked

Cognition Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer · 2023–now founder still there Scale AI Engineer (early engineer, per Turing Post) past

How it happened

iThin early record

Public sources say very little about where he grew up. Forbes lists him as 30 and a US citizen living in San Francisco, which puts his birth around 1996, an estimate. Nothing opened for this review covers his parents, his household or his hometown, and Forbes does not list his education. The class and household values in the coded block are placeholders because the schema has no unknown option.

iiOlympiad and MIT

A conference speaker page says he was an IOI gold medalist for the United States and studied computer science and mathematics at MIT. An article from Turing Post says he won IOI gold in 2014 and graduated from MIT in 2014. Those two years sit oddly with a birth year near 1996, so the graduation year is not used here. Who paid for MIT, or whether he held a scholarship, is not established.

iiiScale AI

Forbes says he was an engineer at Scale AI before Cognition. Turing Post calls him one of its earliest engineers. His dates there, his title and his pay are not established.

ivCognition

Turning point

Forbes says he co-founded Cognition with Scott Wu and Walden Yan, whom he met on the competitive coding circuit, and that all three are gold medalists. Wikipedia lists Wu as CEO, Hao as CTO and Yan as CPO. Turing Post describes the start as a hackathon-style weekend around Thanksgiving 2023 in a rented Airbnb, with a prototype around Christmas that became Devin. Cognition came out of stealth in March 2024. What set him apart from other strong engineers was a ready-made team of peers from the olympiad world and a product that happened to fit the moment. His own account of why he left Scale is not established.

vFunding

Per Wikipedia and Turing Post, Founders Fund put in $21 million at about a $350 million valuation in early 2024, then led a $175 million round at $2 billion in April 2024. Later rounds were reported at about $4 billion in March 2025, $10 billion in September 2025 and $26 billion in May 2026. Forbes says Cognition raised $2 billion in September 2026 at a $48 billion valuation, a figure that sits apart from the other sources. Wikipedia also reports that Cognition agreed to acquire Windsurf in July 2025, after Google hired Windsurf's CEO and senior staff.

viWhere it landed

Forbes showed $5.8 billion on October 20, 2026, rank 715, self-made 8. The page gives no ownership percentage, so the figure is an estimate of a private stake whose value rests on the company's latest valuation.

viiLegal record

The Wikipedia article on Cognition mentions no lawsuits, controversies or layoffs, and no other litigation search was run. That is an absence of reporting in one summary source, not a clearance.

Can you replicate their success?

Partly

Olympiad training, a top engineering school and a job at a fast-growing start-up were open to a very strong student with no capital. The company step needed co-founders of the same caliber, venture investors willing to back an unproven agent product at large valuations, and a market opening in AI coding. His family's resources are not documented, so how much a safety net mattered is unknown.

Required conditions

1 Elite competitive-programming or equivalent technical ability

2 Co-founders from the same talent network

3 Venture investors who would fund an early-stage AI product at high valuations

4 A technology shift to build on

The coded evidence

Thirteen groups, every claim sourced

Feeds cost of failure

Parent Occupations

Low

not established

Not established in sources opened. The household and migration values in the coded block are placeholders.

↗ forbes.com

Structural context

founder lens · venture capital

The cost-of-failure score comes from this person's own money and circumstances. But who they were in America carried its own weight, the same way their household or income did, and it shaped how hard the path was just as much. That part isn't in the cost-of-failure number. It's here instead.

tailwindman

Men founded the companies that took nearly all the venture funding and almost every top outcome, a tailwind that never shows up in one person's own circumstances.

↗ techcrunch.com

Among the people recorded here — men: 225. Representation here is who reached these outcomes, not equal odds of reaching them.