Coding Agent Devin Modernizes Millions of Lines of Code for Sapporo City Government

Cognition, the startup behind the autonomous coding agent Devin, announced that Japan has become its main foothold for expansion in Asia. The company opened a Tokyo office in April 2026 and plans to launch a regional Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore later this year. The move was first reported by Fortune, citing a conversation with the company's CEO, Russell Kaplan.

Sapporo as a showcase

The clearest evidence of Devin's traction in Japan is its work with the city government of Sapporo. The AI agent helped modernize more than a million lines of legacy code across municipal systems, completing the work in roughly fifty engineer-months, compared with an estimated two hundred months a team of human developers would have needed.

That result points to where Cognition sees its real edge, not in flashy demos but in the grinding work of untangling old, poorly documented public-sector code, of which Japan has an unusually large amount. Kaplan noted that Japan was one of the two countries with the highest Devin user engagement in the world, just behind the United States.

Demographics driving demand

Japan is grappling with a deeply entrenched demographic crisis. Nearly thirty percent of the population is over sixty five, and the working-age population is projected to shrink by more than thirty percent by 2060. Analysts cited by Fortune estimate the country could be short almost eight hundred thousand software engineers by 2030.

Under those conditions, the aging digital infrastructure of public administration and private companies, built on code written decades ago, becomes an urgent problem that can't be solved simply by hiring more people, because there aren't enough of them to hire. Kaplan said plainly that the needs in critical infrastructure and public administration are real, not theoretical.

Cognition's scale and finances

Cognition raised more than a billion dollars in funding in May 2026 at a valuation reaching twenty six billion dollars, and its annualized revenue stood at four hundred ninety two million dollars at the time. The company says demand for the computing power needed to run Devin doubles roughly every seven weeks, a pace that itself signals how fast adoption of coding agents is growing among companies worldwide.

A telling sign of the tool's popularity in Japan is that the local developer community has informally started calling it Devin-kun, adding the polite Japanese honorific suffix. The nickname suggests something beyond a corporate rollout, it points to the tool becoming genuinely woven into teams' daily work.

What comes next, and what it means for Poland

Beyond Japan, Cognition is already eyeing South Korea, Australia, and Malaysia, where it has launched an Applied AI Engineering training program. The company's strategy is to target markets that share a similar combination of an aging workforce and large stockpiles of legacy code across government and big organizations.

The same pattern, an aging engineering workforce, tight budgets for new hires, and IT systems written years ago, also describes a good part of Poland's public administration and large companies in the financial and energy sectors. The Sapporo case is worth watching not as a curiosity from the other side of the world, but as a scenario likely to surface sooner or later in discussions about digitizing Polish government offices and large enterprises. Sources: Fortune, Japan taps Cognition's 'Devin-kun' as legacy code, shrinking workforce opens market for AI coding (fortune.com).