- Joined Cognition
- Mar 2026
- How they joined
- With Axlora
- Status
- Current
“After meeting other former founders at Cog, I realized joining wouldn’t mean giving that up. … It would feel a little bit like founding another company – just with the support, infrastructure, and community of an established one.”
- Posted Aug 19, 2026 that 'customers are finding and resolving O(million) of security findings with a product suite my team built. and now it's in times square.', confirming he leads the team behind Devin for Security.Aug 19, 2026customers are finding and resolving O(million) of security findings with a product suite my team built. and now it's in times square. my favorite part is watching the surprise when i walk customers through automating big chunks of their vuln mgmt program. they ask "can it do IaC? docker? can it read logs from infra? is it more like SAST or DAST? how does runtime validation work?" yes. there's
- Quoted in Cognition's July 1, 2026 Devin Security Swarm launch release as 'Security Engineering Lead at Cognition', a title.Jul 1, 2026
- Co-Owner & CTO of Axlora (Jun 2024-Mar 2026), the compliance implementation company LinkedIn lists as 'Acquired by Cognition'; Axlora's site offers free compliance and security resources for startups.Mar 2026
- Experiments that grew out of Playground led to Devin for Security (devin.ai/security); he now leads much of Cognition's work across security and governance products and was hiring for infrastructure/platform primitives.
- Commented on Cognition hiring a CISO (Oct 2026): 'searching for a ciso is hard for so many reasons, and im stoked that we've found such a legend to carry the torch at cognition'.Oct 1, 2026
- Co-founded Crosswire (Sep 2021-Oct 2024) with Johnny Wang, an a16z-, General Catalyst- and Harpoon-backed startup building identity threat detection and response software; he joked on stage that 'my co-founder is Johnny Wang, which is very confusing.'Dec 14, 2022
- Before Cognition, Nick spent several years starting companies; most recently he and cofounder Mary built a compliance implementation services company that was profitable with paying customers.
- Cognition acquired his compliance implementation company after FDE Stephen Cornwell and Calvin (VP of Customer Engineering) separately booked 'catch up' calls, told him to try Devin, and Calvin suggested an acquisition - a warm-path recruiting pattern Cognition uses for founders.
- He built Devin's Playground, a secure environment where anyone at Cognition can use Devin to build and deploy internal apps (CogHub intranet, coffee ordering app, merch store, recruiting tools) with guardrails on sensitive data.
- At Navigate 2026 he gave a talk on building effective teams of agents, framed by Browserbase as 'Your agents should be a workforce, not a factory'.Oct 15, 2026
- Devin Security Swarm, the product he spoke for at launch, uses an agentic map-reduce architecture with parallel agents, reproduces each finding in an isolated sandbox, and found 36 of 50 real-world GHSA vulnerabilities across 14 languages at 30% lower cost per finding than the next most accurate scanner.Jul 1, 2026
- Nick and cofounder Mary joined Cognition's SF office together after the acquisition; CEO Scott Wu congratulated them on the acquisition.
Acquired by Cognition
a16z, General Catalyst, & Harpoon-backed. built software for identity threat detection and response
launched new onboarding flows for Google's phone plan
designed efficient stylus for chromebooks
cs50, 1 of 5 to receive top TA award voted by ~900 students
used LSTMs to detect disease-causing genetic abnormalities in maternal genomic data
handled security response to 2 zero-days: meltdown & spectre
customers are finding and resolving O(million) of security findings with a product suite my team built. and now it's in times square. my favorite part is watching the surprise when i walk customers through automating big chunks of their vuln mgmt program. they ask "can it do IaC? docker? can it read logs from infra? is it more like SAST or DAST? how does runtime validation work?" yes. there's
if blindly tokenmaxxing isn't your enterprise ai strategy... then you're probably being quite thoughtful about making sure you're getting real roi out of these new tools. cognition's mission is to build the future of software engineering, which means we've always been focused on delivering outcomes and completed engineering projects. now we just guarantee it. https://lnkd.in/guuZHHBg
Axlora is joining Cognition! Back in 2024 when I was winding down my first company, I felt pretty embarrassed - I had not exactly achieved the Silicon Valley Dream™. I really appreciate Ali Partovi & Stephen Cornwell and numerous other people who gave me great advice at a very low point in my life. Ali & Stephen also became the first customers of Axlora, a bootstrapped services company that I st
"If this were a code review for a hire decision: Repo 1 reflects senior-level production instincts. Repo 2 reflects junior-to-mid level work that would need mentoring around architecture and defensive programming." --Claude i wanted to make an anti-slop repo template and share it, here's how i did it: it's honestly so cool that companies like OpenAI StrongDM Vercel and LangChain are putting so m
i like hunting down the og sources from blogs / news aggregators to try and see if i can have an original thought™, so i built a lil tool to help my agents do the same: https://lnkd.in/gx9jM6p9 it works best if you use Steel and LiteLLM (YC W23) to do some re-ranking + full page rendering, and it's meant to be used in conjunction with other tooling for an agent to do a lot of research. hope you
nice work Emil Bender Lassen Rune Kvist Rajiv Dattani : https://lnkd.in/gj_XkZ7m
obsessed with https://no.security from Caleb Sima, also from today's newsletter: "On the governance front, Discord’s global age verification mandate drops next month (face scans or ID for “adult” access), and a compelling analysis from Resilient Cyber highlights a massive blind spot: none of the major AI governance frameworks—NIST AI RMF, EU AI Act, or ISO 42001—mention agentic AI even once. As o
Vercel and StrongDM inspired me to build a tiny little codebase context generator called `pyramid-context` for working with agents i use it in my codebases now, and it's helpful (for small, non-production codebases), and i hope you find it helpful too as a little proof of concept - https://lnkd.in/gvmrDBrp
