At just 30 years old, Steven Hao is the youngest member of the 2026 Forbes 400 list with a net worth of $5.8 billion.
His fortune comes from Cognition, an AI coding startup he founded with Scott Wu and Walden Yan back in 2024, that has now become one of the fastest-growing companies in the industry.
But Hao’s rise didn’t begin with Cognition.
Long before the company made him a billionaire, Hao was competing at the highest levels of programming and helping other startups get their projects off the ground. Those experiences laid the groundwork for a career that would eventually make him one of the youngest people to ever join Forbes’ hallowed list.
Hao was a programming prodigy before he became a billionaire
Nearly a decade before Cognition, Steven Hao was making a name for himself in the competitive coding circuit.
As a teen, he won the International Olympiad in Informatics, the global competitive-programming championship, taking home the gold medal in 2014. Following the win, he enrolled at MIT, where he majored in computer science and mathematics.
In 2018, shortly after graduating, he joined ScaleAI as a software developer.
During his tenure at ScaleAI, Hao worked in a variety of departments, including Scale 3D Sensor Fusion, Scale Image, and Scale Video, before eventually leading the technical development of Mapping.
Hao hasn’t spoken publicly about his time with the company, or what ultimately led him to exit. But in 2024, he founded Cognition with Wu and Yan, leaving the relative safety of a Meta- and Amazon-backed tech company to strike out on his own.
The AI engineer behind Cognition’s $48 billion valuation
According to the company’s website, Cognition’s goal is to “expand human capacity — not by replacing meaningful work but by working alongside people as an exponential collaborator, helping them think deeper and move faster.”
The primary way it does that is through Devin, an autonomous software engineer that writes and repairs code.
With Devin, users “don’t just delegate tasks, [they] delegate responsibilities,” Hao said in a 2026 Gitnation presentation.
“What that means is Devin is not just writing code, it’s also reviewing code, testing and QAing features, and deploying and monitoring the rollout of these features,” he continued. “If there’s ever a user bug or a production error, Devin will be the first responder to any incident, monitoring error streams and sentry errors.”
Launched as a demo in 2024, Devin is now used by dozens of major companies, including Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and Mercedes-Benz.
Cognition is turning Devin into a very big business
Cognition isn’t just selling Devin’s capabilities to other companies. The startup also uses the product internally, giving Hao and his team a real-world test case for their own technology.
“I often get this question, which is, Cognition is a two-year-old company that has 50 engineers, and yet has half a billion of revenue and is valued at $26 billion. And it’s a pretty small team for a company of this size,” Hao said in his Gitnation presentation.
“And I guess the answer is just Devin,” he continued. “Devin augments our engineering team so that even with a relatively lean engineering team, we can do the work of a much larger organization. And this comes in handy, because being the biggest users of our product lets us kind of stay on top of it and make sure what we’re selling to our customers is a great experience.”
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Another significant metric for investors is how rapidly Cognition’s revenues have expanded.
In May, the company said its annualized run-rate revenue had reached $492 million. By September, that figure had climbed to nearly $900 million, according to Cognition.
Cognition’s rapid growth has attracted a new wave of investors, pushing the startup’s valuation to $48 billion in September, less than three years after it was founded.
In a Series E funding round, the TheStreet reported that new investors Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Altimeter, and Bain Capital Ventures joined existing backers, including Peter Theil’s Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Avenir, in supporting the tech startup.
The round nearly doubled the company’s valuation from May, when it was estimated at $26 billion.
Hao isn’t slowing down
The latest influx of cash dramatically increased the implied value of Cognition, and with Hao holding the largest stake among the company’s founders, it helped propel his estimated fortune to $5.8 billion. Wu and Yan, meanwhile, did not make the 2026 Forbes 400.
Despite the company’s remarkably fast ascent, Cognition, and Hao, don’t seem content to just rest on their laurels and enjoy the view from the top.
Earlier this year, the company announced plans to expand its business across Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Korea. And in September, it announced a multi-year strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services that will make it easier for enterprise customers to deploy Devin within their existing AWS environments.
For Hao, the path from competitive programming champion to Forbes 400 billionaire has taken less than a decade.
Now, the bigger question is how far Devin can take the company he built.
