The Age of Async Agents — Cognition's Walden Yan & OpenInspect's Cole Murray
Cognition raises $1B Series D as async background agents emerge as dominant AI coding paradigm
“async agents were the most AGI pilled bet you could make in 2024”— Jensen Huang
Cognition (makers of Devin) closed an oversubscribed $1B Series D while the broader market validates their async agent thesis, with companies like Shopify, Stripe, and Ramp all building background coding agents. The piece frames a three-wave evolution: autocomplete → local agents → async background agents, positioning the 'Age of Async Agents' as the current dominant paradigm. This signals that the async, human-out-of-the-loop coding agent category has crossed from experimental to mainstream enterprise adoption.