Japan taps Cognition’s ‘Devin-kun’ as legacy coder, labor shortage opens up AI coding market

“Japan was our first or second most popular country in terms of overall user engagement,” said Russell Kaplan, president of Cognition AI, the San Francisco startup behind code AI tool Devin, in early June.

The East Asian country has the oldest population in the world, with around 30% of its citizens over the age of 65. Japan’s working-age population is expected to decline by more than 30% between now and 2060. The decline leads to a shortage of programming talent: By 2023, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) estimates 07% of the country’s software. 2030.

Cognition AI makes Japan the first step in its Asian expansion, opening a Tokyo office in April; it will follow by making Singapore its Asia-Pacific headquarters later this year.

The company is betting that Japan will be the perfect proving ground for AI-powered software engineering. “The needs are real, especially in critical infrastructure and government,” Kaplan said. “The country is running an aging infrastructure as the number of workers decreases.”

The benefits of efficiency can be huge. Faced with a national IT compliance mandate, the Sapporo city government needed to modernize more than a million lines of legacy code, which Kaplan estimated would normally take 200 months of engineering work. Using Devin, Sapporo engineers completed it in about a quarter of that time.

Even before Cognition was officially launched in Japan, Devin was already going “viral” in Japan. “There was a debate about what was the appropriate honor for Devin,” Kaplan said, referring to the suffixes attached to names to designate public office.

“It’s something that the community settled on Devin-kun.”

Japan’s bet on US AI

Japan has become the sea-head of choice for US AI companies looking to expand globally. OpenAI and Anthropic both opened their first international offices in Tokyo. Microsoft, Alphabet, and other hyperscalers have devoted billions to Japanese data centers. Japan also became the second country to secure access to Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model, with three major banks—MUFG, Mizuho, ​​and Sumitomo Mitsui—among those granted access through Project Glasswing, a program to help key companies and critical institutions address security risks. (This access was immediately closed after the US banned all foreigners from using the model in mid-June.)

While South Korea, Singapore, and other regional economies have made AI a priority, Japan seems more comfortable sticking to US AI, thanks to the country’s investment and close ties to American AI labs.

“Japan has invested inappropriately in working closely with American companies to influence those companies’ ways to meet domestic needs,” Kaplan said. One of OpenAI’s biggest investors is Softbank, a large Japanese telecommunications company owned by tech booster Masayoshi Son.

AI could present an opportunity for Japan to integrate its digital systems with the rest of the world. Kaplan suggested that not knowing English well “has led to the isolation of some businesses in Japan.” Yet many AI natives go beyond that barrier. Japanese developers can work with Devin entirely in Japanese while interacting with agents and teams on the other side of the world.

AI coding reaches Asia

Cognition AI, founded in 2023, is best known for its AI coding tool Devin. The tool works like a full AI software engineering team: Assign it work, and it writes code, debugs, and automatically releases code within the tools the engineering team is already using.

Devin was one of the first cases of “AI workers,” or agents fully integrated into workplace tools like Slack that employees can assign tasks to without constant prompting.

In late May, Cognition raised more than $1 billion in a new funding round at a startup valuation of $26 billion, more than doubling its valuation from a September 2025 round. The company’s annualized revenue reached $492 million at the time of the raise, up from $37 million last year.

Cognition AI coding tools, for some investors, pose an existential threat to existing programmers and software engineers, especially in countries like India, a traditional center for back-office work. The prospect of AI agents doing that same job at a fraction of the cost is exciting investors. Shares in Infosys, Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services, and HCTech have all fallen between 30% and 40% in the past 12 months.

But Kaplan isn’t worried about India’s ability to adapt to AI. “In India, an engineer’s job can be fun and impactful. Suddenly you have someone who was working alone on some part of a project, and they get promoted when they have a whole team of AI agents working for them.” Kaplan said. “The companies we work with are using productivity gains to be more ambitious.”

One of Cognition’s most unexpected growth markets is Malaysia. The country’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, has become a hub for software engineering, driven by a large English-speaking talent pool, low operating costs, and proximity to the rest of Southeast Asia. Kaplan described the engineers his team met there as among the best in the world at managing AIs.

Cognition launched what it calls the Applied AI Engineering program in Malaysia, which identifies top engineers who excel in guiding agents and trains them to teach entire teams how to effectively work with AI.

Kaplan is also eyeing South Korea and Australia as markets for Asia-Pacific expansion.

The increased presence of cognition presents another benefit. Compute, the processing power on which AI systems operate, is a finite resource; Kaplan says demand at Cognition doubles roughly every seven weeks. But different geographical groups allow the computer to be used during off-hours on Wall Street and Silicon Valley. “When people are at work in Japan, people in New York are sleeping,” Kaplan said. “There’s a lot of efficiency you get as an AI company that works that way.”