In the winter of 2023, inside a rented house in Burlingame, California, 10 friends holed up together to hack on a bold idea.  

Their vision? Create an autonomous AI software engineer that could handle coding projects from beginning to end, responding to natural language commands. 

But this wasn’t just any group of Silicon Valley dreamers. Scott Wu, Walden Yan, Steven Hao, and their friends happen to be among the best programmers in the world, with multiple gold and silver medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics.  

They knew they could harness increasingly powerful large language models to help companies tackle time-consuming software projects—from debugging and code migration to full-stack engineering. Their company, Cognition AI, came out of stealth mode in early 2024, releasing a new AI software engineer named Devin (derived from “developer”) and quickly winning enterprise customers. 

“The world is short of software engineers,” said Cognition Chief Executive Scott Wu. “The heart of software engineering is deep, logical problem-solving, and Devin allows human developers to spend more time on that creative work and offload more mundane coding to AI software assistants.” 

When it came time to choose a cloud platform on which to build Devin, Wu said it wasn’t a difficult decision. He and his team turned to Microsoft Azure.

“Microsoft leadership is focused on being at the forefront of AI innovation, so Azure was a natural choice for us,” Scott said. “It’s a great platform. Azure has allowed us to deploy more securely and attract enterprise customers.”

Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott congratulated Scott when Devin became generally available, saying software development is one of the most promising areas of innovation in the generative AI revolution and that Cognition is “building amazing new things to help developers do their best work.” 

New Innovators Lounge 

Silicon Valley has long been synonymous with bold ideas and game-changing technology.

That’s why the Experience Center Silicon Valley is a perfect home for Microsoft’s first Innovators Lounge spotlighting 18 companies, including Cognition, delivering disruptive technologies built on the Azure AI platform. Other innovative Silicon Valley companies featured include Meltwater, Forescout Technologies, and Harvey.

“Our new Innovators Lounge showcases the groundbreaking solutions these companies are creating with AI on the Azure platform. They are driving real-world impact and accelerating AI transformation across industries,” said Corporate Vice President Katy Brown, who leads Microsoft’s Americas Enterprise organization from her base in San Francisco.

The Lounge features a hands-on demo of Devin, introducing thousands of executives who visit the Experience Center to the way Cognition is supercharging software development through AI. 

To build this cutting-edge AI teammate, Cognition uses a range of Microsoft solutions, including AI innovation tools such as Azure OpenAI ChatGPT and Azure Kubernetes Service, as well as data and compute solutions such as Azure Virtual Machines for scalable cloud computing and Azure Blob Storage for unstructured data storage. 

Democratizing AI by creating parity in data access 

Visitors to Microsoft’s Experience Center in Silicon Valley will also discover another enterprising company: New York-based Yobi AI. 

Max Snow, CEO of Yobi, has been fascinated by the power of big data since his first startup, a music distribution company leveraging algorithms to predict the success of songs. 

In 2019, after selling that first startup, he set his sights higher. He had witnessed firsthand how smaller companies are at a disadvantage compared with enormous retailers that can leverage their vast amounts of data to target customers with laser focus. So Max founded Yobi AI to create a way for companies of all sizes to access third-party data in an ethical, responsible way and harness AI to predict consumer behavior. 

By leveraging Microsoft Azure Databricks, Azure Data Factory, and Azure OpenAI Service, Yobi is creating parity between large tech companies and smaller businesses, enabling them to develop reliable insights and personalized customer experiences. 

“We believe that if companies want to truly take advantage of the promise that comes with AI, we need bigger and better datasets than what’s publicly available,” Max said. “We’ve discovered great synergy with Microsoft because our beliefs about responsible AI and ethical data use align, and that’s led to a great go-to-market partnership.” 

Yobi partners with leading US enterprises to extract and aggregate predictive consumer intent, removing all identifiable customer information in the process.

That allows Yobi’s customers to gain invaluable insights into customer behavior and preferences. The company’s customers can harness over $2 trillion of consented demand signals so that they can develop innovative products, optimize shopper acquisition, and deepen customer loyalty. 

As disruptive startups transform industries from software coding to marketing to financial services with generative AI, Microsoft will continue to celebrate companies like Yobi and Cognition that are redefining how we work and what we can achieve.