# Arjun Mishra

![Arjun Mishra](/resources/cognition/portraits/arjun-mishra.webp)

Special projects engineer at Cognition (Devin, Windsurf); ex-Theory Ventures, Denali co-founder, ex-Google APM  
Cognition  
San Francisco, California, United States

## At Cognition

- Role: special projects engineer (Engineering)
- Joined: Feb 2025
- How they joined: Directly
- Before Cognition: Sig Int, Theory Ventures
- Overlapped before Cognition with other Cognition people at: Google; UC Berkeley (https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/worked-together)

## Identity
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunmishra15
- X: @Colhodm
- GitHub: https://github.com/Colhodm
- Domain: cognition.ai

## Notes
- Positions Devin for security remediation after Anthropic's Mythos/Project Glasswing: "Mythos while identifying vulnerabilities doesn't remediate or solve them. Naturally our largest customers asked us to help them solve this." and "Agentic Map Reduce will be the default way to keep enterprise applications secure", crediting colleagues Angela L., Ido Pesok and Nicholas W. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/arjunmishra15_security-teams-do-not-need-more-untriaged-ugcPost-7478277780871229440-Zm2O)
- How he got to Cognition, in his words: "I was determined after never having worked at a company for more than a year - to find a sick place to work. @calvingiroud whose judgement is the best out of anyone I know, had joined a few months before, and told me to chat. I entered the famed cog house at 12pm and left at 9." (https://x.com/Colhodm/status/2075756635268780250)
- Was part of Cognition's earliest enterprise Devin deployments: "We first deployed Devin for our customers in early 2025... our early customers who were large financial institutions with custom infrastructure... we needed to deploy Devin within their VPC." He describes hour-long calls "sometimes in Portuguese and Spanish" walking banks through VPC installs. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/arjunmishra15_we-first-deployed-devin-for-our-customers-activity-7465137169951592449-Unte)
- Publicly argues FDE quality is a moat: "Most people are not opinionated enough on the talent of FDEs they hire — if the product and your deployed engineers are the front door of your product, you need to have an exceptionally high bar." (https://x.com/Colhodm/status/2087313407708119533)
- Credits forward-deployed engineers: "One of our FDEs deploying Devin at a Brazilian bank, for example, became the company's top expert in COBOL" and names "Sam Fertig our COBOL expert"; reports "A senior executive at a top 20 bank recently told me we were one of the best vendors they've seen in the last 30 years." (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/arjunmishra15_we-first-deployed-devin-for-our-customers-activity-7465137169951592449-Unte)
- Post-acquisition Windsurf involvement: shared Cognition's Windsurf acquisition news ("New Wave Dropped Devin Windsurf") and wrote "Pretty cool to see Devin and Windsurf working with one of the most storied companies in the world" about Mercedes-Benz. (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/arjunmishra15_everyone-remembers-the-first-car-they-ever-activity-7454560997178015744-rLqj)
- Before Cognition: 'Sig Int' at Theory Ventures (Tomasz Tunguz's early-stage software VC, Menlo Park), Mar 2024 to Feb 2025; Theory's $450M Fund II release lists him as 'AI & software engineer / ex-Googler', and investor directories show him as an investor at Theory. (https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241122545291/en/Theory-Ventures-Launches-%24450-Million-Second-Fund-for-the-Next-Generation-of-Enterprise-Software)
- Recent posts lean on customer acquisition ("startups love devin", Oct 2026; "our customers help make us better every day we love them everyone else: dm me", Sep 2026). (https://x.com/Colhodm/status/2115676173804163247)
- Demos Devin as a cloud agent with overnight game builds: "before I slept, last week I had devin build age of empires. when i woke up it was done thats what a cloud agent is for" and "Devin shipped FIFA 26 Premier League before i slept", hosted at colhodm.github.io/FIFA. (https://x.com/Colhodm/status/2088464443781111825)
- Describes Cognition's culture verbatim: "Work that by all rights should take months is done in hours by our engineering and sales teams, because we're like the Yankees - if everyone was Ty Cobb. Everyone bats .350 here - join our squad". (https://x.com/Colhodm/status/2075756635268780250)
- X version of the security post thanks "@ido_pesok, Nick, and Angela" and "our massive finserv customers who have helped us co-design this with their needs". (https://x.com/Colhodm/status/2072373857999098214)
- Google Associate Product Manager (Feb 2021 to Jan 2022) on ML-based curation for Memories in Google Photos; earlier an APM intern on Pixel Camera Software (summer 2020), where he shipped Astrolapse and Camera Storage Manager on Fall 2020 Pixel devices. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunmishra15)
- MinIO intern (summer 2018), where he "Built a SQL Engine in Go, that was 10x faster than Amazon's"; a MinIO vulnerability write-up credits Arjun Mishra on the commit "S3 Select API Support for CSV (#6127)", his open source contribution to minio/minio. (http://hunters-sec.com/security-context/vuln/GO-2026-5415)
- On the Sept 2025 $10B valuation he posted: "Software Engineering is rapidly changing — sometimes I have to pinch myself because it is hard to believe what Devin is capable of. We're all hands on deck, and always in the market for great talent. Reach out!" (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/arjunmishra15_cognition-ai-reaches-10-billion-valuation-activity-7370857554744287232-jQe8)
- Cognition signed a definitive agreement to acquire Windsurf (the agentic IDE, formerly Codeium) on 2025-07-14, about five months after he joined; it was announced days after Google DeepMind hired Windsurf's CEO. Since then he has sold Devin and Windsurf together. (https://cognition.com/blog/windsurf)
- UC Berkeley BS Computer Science (2017-2020) and MS EECS (2020-2021); his master's report 'Characterizing Circuits with Deep Embeddings' (UCB/EECS-2021-190) was advised by Prof. Vladimir Stojanovic and used VAEs on circuit-level datasets. (https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2021/EECS-2021-190.html)
- Software engineering intern at Affirm (Aug to Nov 2020) on merchant self-onboarding; ML intern at Groq (summer 2019), where LinkedIn says he "Built a compiler". (https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunmishra15)
- Built a street-racing game with Devin "in 1 hour": "a large part of my early childhood was playing street racer games Devin made this street racing game for me in 1 hour". (https://x.com/Colhodm/status/2082342151665688740)
- 8VC Fellow, 2020 cohort, then a UC Berkeley EECS student focused on computer vision; the fellow page notes he enjoys basketball, soccer and FIFA and once met Floyd Mayweather in an ice cream line. (https://8vc.com/fellows/arjun-mishra)
- GitHub account Colhodm (Arjun Mishra) was created June 2016 and has about 35 public repos and 9 followers; it hosts colhodm.github.io game demos built with Devin. (https://github.com/Colhodm)
- Personal interests visible on X: football (Premier League, penalty shootouts, World Cup posts with @rchoudhury997) and racing games; X bio reads "refuse to join any club that would have me as a member pay to see building @ cognition". (https://x.com/Colhodm)

## Experience
- special projects engineer at Cognition - Atherton, California, United States (Feb 2025 - Present): Devin
- Sig Int at Theory Ventures - Menlo Park, California, United States (Mar 2024 - Feb 2025)
- Cofounder at Denali (Apr 2022 - Oct 2023): ripping dials or bust (backed by Neo)
creating state of the art full-stack calling app involving React Mutex
maintaining our db schemas and maintaining performance
handling server provisioning, reverse proxy routing, and web server implementation
- Associate Product Manager at Google (Feb 2021 - Jan 2022): Work on improving ML-based Curation for Memories on Google Photos
- Software Engineer Intern at Affirm, Inc. (Aug 2020 - Nov 2020): Worked on letting Merchants self-onboard to work with Affirm.
- Associate Product Manager Intern at Google - Mountain View, California, United States (May 2020 - Aug 2020): Pixel Camera Software
Shipped Astrolapse & Camera Storage Manager on new Pixel devices in Fall 20'
- 8VC Fellow at 8VC - San Francisco Bay Area (Apr 2020 - Aug 2020): Learned https://www.8vc.com/fellows/arjun-mishra
- Machine Learning Intern at Groq (May 2019 - Aug 2019): Built a compiler
- Software Engineering Intern at Minio, Inc. - Palo Alto (May 2018 - Aug 2018): • Built a SQL Engine in Go, that was 10x faster than Amazon's

## Education
- UC Berkeley College of Engineering - Master of Science - MS Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Artificial Intelligence - (Jan 2020 - Jan 2021): Researched creating information-rich auto-encodings using VAEs on circuit-level datasets with Professor Vladamir Stojanovic
- University of California, Berkeley - Bachelor's degree, Computer Science - (Jan 2017 - Jan 2020)

## Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjunmishra15
- https://x.com/Colhodm
- https://github.com/Colhodm
- https://cognition.com/blog/windsurf
- https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/14/cognition-maker-of-the-ai-coding-agent-devin-acquires-windsurf/
- http://hunters-sec.com/security-context/vuln/GO-2026-5415
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/arjunmishra15_new-wave-dropped-devin-windsurf-activity-7350595014416097280-pcI4
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/arjunmishra15_everyone-remembers-the-first-car-they-ever-activity-7454560997178015744-rLqj
- https://8vc.com/fellows/arjun-mishra
- https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241122545291/en/Theory-Ventures-Launches-%24450-Million-Second-Fund-for-the-Next-Generation-of-Enterprise-Software
- https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2021/EECS-2021-190.html
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/arjunmishra15_we-first-deployed-devin-for-our-customers-activity-7465137169951592449-Unte
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/arjunmishra15_cognition-ai-reaches-10-billion-valuation-activity-7370857554744287232-jQe8
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/arjunmishra15_security-teams-do-not-need-more-untriaged-ugcPost-7478277780871229440-Zm2O
- https://x.com/Colhodm/status/2075756635268780250
- https://x.com/Colhodm/status/2087313407708119533
- https://x.com/Colhodm/status/2115676173804163247
- https://x.com/Colhodm/status/2088464443781111825
- https://x.com/Colhodm/status/2072373857999098214
- https://x.com/Colhodm/status/2082342151665688740


Researched with Autumn (https://www.autumn.ai) from public sources. Updated 2026-11-04. Profile: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people/arjun-mishra · Everyone at Cognition: https://www.autumn.ai/resources/cognition/people