Cognition establishes Japan entity in first expansion into Asia

The AI coding agent company has also appointed Takumi Masai as Japan President & General Manager.

Cognition has made its expansion into the Asian region as the AI coding agent company establishes a Japan entity. Cognition has also appointed Takumi Masai as Japan President and General Manager to lead its operations and growth in the country.

With continuing to see AI growth, Cognition believes the country is an important market for AI-powered software development, especially with Japanese enterprises accelerating AI adoption, modernizing core systems and operating with a constrained developer workforce.

The expansion into Japan will also see Cognition have a dedicated local team to work with Japanese enterprises to improve engineering productivity, tackle projects that were previously out of reach, and accelerate the pace at which software gets built and shipped.

Masai, who will be leading the team in Japan, has more than 30 years of experience in advanced system development and enterprise transformation in the country. Prior to joining Cognition, Masai held senior leadership roles at technology companies in Japan including IBM, Pivotal, Microsoft, Workday. He most recently served as President for Datadog in Japan.

Commenting on his new role, Masai said he is truly honored to join Cognition and support the transformation of software development in Japan.

“As AI adoption accelerates, there is a significant opportunity to rethink how organizations build and operate software. Together with our partners, we aim to help shape a new era of software development and strengthen the global competitiveness of Japanese enterprises,” Masai said.

The expansion into Japan comes as Cognition is already working with Japanese organizations. This includes DeNA, a leading Japanese tech company that has used Devin to more than double operation efficiency across multiple engineering functions, including new service development, code quality improvement, and the automation of routine development workflows.

Devin is the world's first fully autonomous AI software engineer developed by Cognition Labs. It acts as a teammate that can handle end-to-end software projects, including writing, debugging, testing, and deploying code using its own terminal, browser, and IDE. It is designed for complex tasks like language migrations, debugging, and AI integration, operating via natural language prompts.

Supporting Cognition's go-to-market in Japan will be a growing network of local partners, including ULS Consulting. A specialist in large-scale enterprise system development, the partnership with ULS Consulting has seen Cognition provide support for Mizuho Securities in becoming one of the first large-scale financial institutions in Japan to deploy Devin. Mizuho Securities is part of one of Japan's three major financial groups.

According to Russell Kaplan, President at Cognition, Japan has a rare combination of things the company believes in. This includes world-class engineering talent, ambitious enterprises, and a genuine appetite for transformation.

"Japanese enterprises have built some of the most complex, high-stakes systems in the world, and have a generation of developers who should be spending their time on hard problems, not basic implementation. Devin was built for exactly this moment. With Takumi Masai leading our team here, we are committed to being a long-term partner to Japanese engineering organizations as they navigate what we believe will be the most significant shift in software development in a generation,” Kaplan said.

A key player in the AI space, Cognition has raised over US$400M at a US$10.2B valuation backed by leading global investors including Founders Fund, Lux Capital, 8VC, Bain Capital Ventures and D1 Capital.