- Joined
- Apr 2024
- How they joined
- Directly
- Before Cognition
- Trunk Tools, Inc.Research Engineer
- Now
- Hone
- Moritz Stephan is the Austrian co-founder and CEO of Hone, a San Francisco AI startup building 'Engines' - persistent agents assigned to own a business outcome over weeks or months rather than a single task.Oct 9, 2026
- At Cognition he was part of a small team of 'brain engineers' who built the core of Devin and owned the planning-and-execution harness at the heart of Devin, per Index Ventures' investment post.Oct 8, 2026
- He spent about two years at Cognition building the Devin planning-and-execution harness before becoming chief of staff to Scott Wu, then left in August 2026 to start Hone.Oct 10, 2026
- Index Ventures says he was among the first engineers to identify and push for Cognition's move into enterprise, and colleagues joked, only half-joking, that Cognition needed 'five more Moritzes'.Oct 8, 2026
- CEO Scott Wu tapped him to serve as Chief of Staff, where he oversaw everything from company strategy to hiring to product decisions.Oct 8, 2026
- Hone co-founders: Oliver Brady (early engineer at Harvey, then built and led Mercor's enterprise effort) and Carlo Kobe (Thiel Fellow who left Harvard to co-found Fizz with Moritz in 2021).Oct 8, 2026
- Bloomberg quotes him as Hone CEO: 'What we are doing is building AI that owns outcomes', describing deploying engines that 'look at what a team does, its goals and responsibilities, and deploy engines to own these'.Oct 8, 2026
- Launched Hone on Aug 12, 2026, thanking 'Scott Wu, Steven Hao, Walden Yan, Russell Kaplan, and all other friends at Cognition for the incredible journey and everything you taught me.'Aug 12, 2026We are launching Hone today. Over the last few years I had a front row seat to how AI has reshaped software engineering. Model progress exceeded my wildest expectations. Yet outside of engineering, most organizations struggle to derive value from AI. At Hone, we enable organiza
- Joined Cognition in March 2024 around Devin's public launch, posting on LinkedIn: 'Devin is the best agent out there by an order of magnitude & I can't wait to see it used widely in the real world. Huge kudos to the Cognition team' and 'Couldn't be more excited to join the team'.Mar 12, 2024Devin is the best agent out there by an order of magnitude & I can't wait to see it used widely in the real world. Huge kudos to the Cognition team
- Current role is Co-Founder at Hone.
- Hone's first named users are Cognition and Modal.Oct 9, 2026
- Co-founded Fizz, the anonymous campus social app, at Stanford with Carlo Kobe in 2021; it went through Y Combinator (S21). Moritz returned to Stanford to finish his degree while Carlo led Fizz for several years.Oct 8, 2026
helped build Devin
Working under Chelsea Finn. - Developed a method to fine-tune LLMs using a single sentence of feedback. First author, ICML '24: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10893 - Applied Meta-RL to automatically grade students' coding submissions. Co-first-author, NeurIPS '22 (oral): https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.08802
Trunk Tools solves the skilled labor shortage by enabling project leaders to increase workforce productivity, safety and profitability by aligning incentives from top to bottom, encouraging efficiency and positively motivating the workforce.
Building the financial ally for young adults.
Space tech startup (+60 people in 4 countries) - Creating a wind-driven Mars rover to enable human exploration through superior surface data
We are launching Hone today. Over the last few years I had a front row seat to how AI has reshaped software engineering. Model progress exceeded my wildest expectations. Yet outside of engineering, most organizations struggle to derive value from AI. At Hone, we enable organiza
Devin is the best agent out there by an order of magnitude & I can't wait to see it used widely in the real world. Huge kudos to the Cognition team
Incredible chance to work with one of the fastest growing companies in AI
Be the engine build the engine
engines drive GTM outcomes
excited to partner. time to start our engines!
all the details about Hone ⬇️
domain experts need to be the ones driving AI diffusion into the real economy
the execution machine
it's a privilege building together!
