Steven Hao, 30 years old, co-founder and CTO of the company Cognition, has become the youngest entrant on the Forbes list for 400 2026. Forbes estimated his fortune at $5,8 billion.
Cognition is a startup that created Devin — an autonomous AI agent capable of independently writing, testing, fixing and deploying software code. The company was founded in 2023 by three former competitive programming champions: Steven Hao, Scott Wu (CEO) and Walden Yan.
In September 2026, Cognition raised more than $2 billion at a valuation of $48 billion (the round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel). Over the previous four months, the company's revenue nearly doubled and reached almost $900 million on an annualized basis. Among its clients are NVIDIA, Citibank, Mercedes-Benz, GE Aerospace and other major companies.
It turns out that Hao became a billionaire precisely thanks to the "artificial programmer" that he himself helped to create. Once, as a young specialist, he dreamed of getting a job as a programmer at a big technology company. Now a programmer can create an artificial colleague — and become a billionaire himself.
Cognition's flagship development is an AI agent named Devin. It is called an artificial programmer: it is capable of independently writing code, finding and fixing errors, carrying out technical assignments and working on real projects almost like a full-fledged member of the team.
Devin was created not merely as an assistant that suggests the next line of code. You can give it a task and then watch as it plans the work, searches for the necessary information, tests solutions and corrects its own mistakes.
Hao's story is especially impressive also because he was considered an outstanding programmer from his youth. In 2014 he won a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics, then worked as an engineer in the AI industry, and in 2023, together with partners, he founded Cognition.
Now the digital programmer they created helps people write code, while helping its creators rise rapidly in the rankings of the world's richest people.
It seems the profession of the future is no longer simply a programmer. It is a person who managed to be the first to create a programmer for everyone else.
