Cognition, the maker of the autonomous coding agent Devin, said on September 10, 2026 that Jonathan Kelley and the full Dioxus Labs team were joining the company. Dioxus Labs, a Y Combinator-backed start-up, develops Dioxus, an open-source Rust framework for building full-stack web, desktop and mobile apps from a single codebase.
No financial terms were disclosed, and neither company described the deal as an acquisition of Dioxus Labs as a business. The team will work on Devin, focusing on its virtual machines, computer-use skills and testing, according to Unite.AI. Cognition describes Devin as an autonomous software engineer that plans, writes, tests and ships production code inside a customer's codebase and existing tools, and says it is deployed at large, complex institutions.
Both sides said the open-source projects will continue. The team will keep maintaining Dioxus and related projects, including the Blitz rendering engine, the Taffy layout library and the Subsecond hot-patching tool.
What Dioxus Labs built
Dioxus began as Kelley's side project in the summer of 2020, then grew into an open-source project, a full-time job and finally a venture-backed start-up; the project's blog dates Kelley's move to working on it full time to May 2023.
Around the core framework the team built several tools. Subsecond hot-patches Rust code while an app is running, keeping its state. Dioxus Native draws apps on the GPU without a web view. Blitz is a modular HTML and CSS rendering engine built on Taffy for layout, Stylo for CSS and the Vello GPU renderer. Kelley wrote that Cloudflare had used Blitz as the core engine of its new agentic web browser.
Kelley wrote that interest in Rust, and in Dioxus, rose sharply in late 2025 once large language models became good at writing Rust code. Users' most common request was a richer set of Rust libraries for device features such as the camera, Bluetooth and storage.
“Our lead engineer on Blitz, Nico Burns, will be devoted full time to maintaining and improving Dioxus.”
How the two companies met
Dioxus Labs had also built its own cloud coding environment, SkyVM, which runs macOS, iOS, Android, Linux and Windows machines. It uses custom virtualisation to snapshot, fork and roll back machines, and can start or resume one in under 50 milliseconds.
Around the same time, Cognition released a new Devin command-line tool whose terminal renderer was built with Dioxus, a rebuild of a renderer Dioxus had itself deprecated. Cognition said it had used Dioxus extensively to build Devin and improve its performance. After the Dioxus team was invited to a demo at Cognition's office, the two sides concluded they were working toward the same goals.
The founders and the funding
Kelley wrote that the team had raised $3.5 million in venture funding over its life, and thanked investors at Y Combinator and Khosla Ventures as well as supporters at Futurewei. The size and dates of individual rounds were not given in the announcements.
Kelley said that joining Cognition removes the need to make money from Dioxus, so the team can develop the framework and Blitz without financial pressure. He acknowledged that the team would have less time to spend only on Dioxus, but said Nico Burns, the lead engineer on Blitz, would work full time on maintaining and improving it. The number of people joining Cognition was not disclosed.
What happens to Dioxus users
Cognition said it would keep supporting Dioxus, Blitz, Taffy and Subsecond and would increase investment in Dioxus Native and Blitz. It said it expected further improvements to the framework in the coming months, built with the help of Devin.
Kelley argued that tools such as Blitz, Subsecond, wasm-split and the DX command-line tool would now reach far more developers than Dioxus users alone. Wasm-split adds automatic code splitting and lazy loading to WebAssembly apps, and the DX tool works with any Rust project, not only those built on Dioxus, according to the Dioxus 0.7 release notes cited by Unite.AI. For companies that depend on the framework, the main open question is how much of the team's time Devin work will take; Cognition has not said.
