Building the Future of Software Engineering in Latin America

Last week at MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo), one of Latin America’s most iconic landmarks, we announced Cognition’s expansion into Latin America in front of leaders from the region’s largest enterprises, governments, and tech companies. It’s the first public step toward something bigger: building the future of software engineering in the region.

São Paulo is our starting point, but our ambition is broader: to help Latin American companies build more of the software their businesses and customers need.

A region ready to build#

Latin America is one of the most mobile-first regions in the world. Consumers have embraced WhatsApp, digital banking, and new financial products at remarkable speed. The systems behind those experiences have not kept pace. A customer in Brazil can pay for lunch by scanning a QR code while the bank processing the transaction still runs on COBOL.

Meeting that demand will take more than hiring more developers. Companies need a different way to build, modernize, and maintain software. Latin America has the talent to lead: 15.8 million developers on GitHub, nearly five times as many as in 2020, and the world’s third-largest developer community behind only the United States and India. The appetite is not just for the latest technology. It’s to build what comes next.

Building with Latin America’s Largest Institutions#

Some of the region’s most demanding engineering teams already build with Devin: banks like Itaú, Nubank, and Santander; consumer leaders like Natura; and fast-growing technology companies like EBANX. The results speak for themselves.

Today, more than 75% of Itaú’s technology teams use Devin: documenting 300,000+ repositories, migrating legacy .NET services to Java 6x faster, and resolving roughly 70% of security vulnerabilities automatically. Bank-wide, Itaú has seen a 20-30% increase in engineering throughput.

At Nubank, Latin America’s largest digital bank with roughly 140 million customers, Devin took a multi-million-line monolith migration from years to weeks, at over 20x lower cost.

Partners like these taught us what Devin had to be: an AI software engineer that works inside highly regulated global institutions, where millions of people depend on systems that can never go down.

Cognition’s Latin America launch event at MASP in São Paulo, Brazil.

Building software for Latin America, in Latin America#

The fact that Latin America’s largest companies are moving first on Devin is proof of a pattern we’re seeing everywhere: the enterprises with the most complex, highest-stakes codebases are moving fastest to make autonomous engineering part of how they build software.

We hope the results we already have here will push more local banks, telcos, retailers, and governments across the region to ask themselves: why keep importing software built somewhere else, when Latin America has the developers, the market, and now the tooling to build it here first?

Our São Paulo team will work with customers across the region, invest in the local developer ecosystem, and help companies build the future of software in Latin America.

We are hiring across Latin America, including a team of deployed engineers to embed with customers. Learn more about open roles here.