Home / Founders / Vasilije Markovic
Markovic left more than a decade of data engineering to study cognitive science and clinical psychology, and his open-source memory engine applies that research to how AI agents store and recall what they learn.
Vasilije Markovic is founder and CEO of Cognee, a Berlin company that builds an open-source memory engine turning documents, chats, and code into knowledge graphs that AI agents can search.
A Decade in Data Engineering
He studied at business school in Italy and then built a career in data engineering at German unicorns, according to a Vermilion Cliffs Ventures interview. In Cognee's seed announcement he wrote that he spent over a decade in big data engineering before starting the company.
Studying How Memory Works
He then went back to school to study cognitive science and clinical psychology, wanting to understand how people organize experience into knowledge and recall the right context at the right time. A course on higher cognition sparked the idea for Cognee, and after trying vector search he built a prototype. He started the company in Berlin in 2024 with the question of why AI agents forget everything between sessions.
Building an Open-Source Memory Engine
In 2025 Cognee's pipeline volume grew from roughly 2,000 runs to more than one million, and he wrote that it was running in more than 70 companies, including Bayer for scientific research. He has argued that embeddings are a building block but not a solution, and that memory needs a graph that tracks relationships and time. "Agents without memory are toys," he wrote.
