From self-driving cars to AI that writes enterprise software: Cogna founder raises $15M

A founder who was an early mover in the race to build autonomous vehicles has raised $15 million for his next act: a startup that claims its AI can write enterprise software on its own.

Cogna — as the U.K.-based startup is called — is led by Ben Peters, the technical co-founder of FiveAI (the self-driving startup that was acquired by Bosch in 2022). Notion Capital is leading the Series A, with Hoxton Ventures and Chalfen Ventures also participating. It comes on the heels of Cogna, founded in May 2023, raising a seed round of $4.75 million earlier this year from a number of investors, including Peters’ FiveAI co-founder Stan Boland and Herman Hauser, the founder of Acorn Software.

The focus of Cogna is the world of enterprise resource planning. ERP is a dry but very necessary software component in the running of organizations, covering everything from procurement and supply chain and inventory management through to risk assessments, finance and human resources. Typically large enterprises can pay up to billions of dollars in contracts with systems integrators and consultancies to handle their ERP, either by customizing off-the-shelf software for clients, or writing custom applications from the ground up, to fit an organization’s particular needs.

In typical AI startup fashion, Peters believes that this work is best done, and can be compressed into, an AI platform built for the purpose. While some challenges have been significantly trickier for AI to address than others, there have been some early signs of ERP potentially being one area where it might stick, and for Cogna to potentially become one of the players delivering on that pitch. A year since launch, Cogna has signed up customers that include the U.K. gas distributor Cadent Gas and infrastructure and utilities service provider Network Plus. 

“To be clear, none of our customers think of it as ERP software,” Peters said in an interview. “For them, they’ve got a problem which isn’t solved by using SAP or [another] legacy system. We deliver a custom, precision-built piece of software for that. They experience [it] ike a classic piece of SaaS, but it happens to have been built specifically for them, specifically for their workflow. And it’s written by our AI.”

Cogna balances a mix of generative AI with other kinds of tooling to actually put together its custom software. Non-technical teams can describe their pain points in natural language, and the Cogna does the rest, the company claims.  

“We’re a team of experts in domain-specific languages, compilers, AI and reliable and scaleable enterprise SaaS,” Peters said.

These days, it’s not uncommon to come across AI startups leveraging multiple large language models simultaneously depending on a particular task at hand — it’s the customization that makes a startup unique — and that is the case here, too. Peters said that the language models used for people to interact with its platform come from a variety of providers that include OpenAI and Anthropic. These are “a key part of our ‘Natural Language Compiler,” Peters told TechCrunch over a call. 

On top of that, Cogna is building an engine so that “the software can truly write itself,” said Hussein Kanji, the co-founder of Hoxton Ventures.

In doing so, Cogna is an example of how generative AI — which saw a viral explosion with the launch of consumer-accessible services like ChatGPT — is indeed being folded into enterprise usage and more complex applications. That is important because a number of foundational AI companies, like OpenAI, have made it clear that they, too, have ambitions to tap into the enterprise market, a highly lucrative area that will help them generate the vast revenues that investors expect.

Kanji likens what Cogna is doing to Cursor, the code building tool from OpenAI-backed Anysphere. We broke the news last week that Anysphere is in the middle a massive, unsolicited bidding war among investors that want to back it, valuing Anysphere as high as $2.5 billion on the back of massive business growth, so the area is clearly very hot.

“That’s kind of what Cogna is also doing,” he said.

Based on his’ experience at self-driving tech company FiveAI, Peters is adept at spotting openings in the market early, but he also has experience in how to shift gears, so to speak, when plans don’t go as you expect them to.

“We had cars driving around London in 2018,” he recalled. “[But] we then pivoted to providing the development environment to develop a stack for other companies that were building their own electronic design automation stack. We were running a million simulations a day by the time we sold the company.”

Five.ai, which had raised around $78 million in funding was valued at $216 million in its last round before it was acquired by Bosch for an undisclosed sum. 

Cogna now plans to go up against classic IT consultancies such as Wipro and  CapGemini.

The investment into Cogna is the first from Bryan Gartner, formerly of Khosla Ventures, who joined Hoxton as its newest partner last year.