It is Poke an OpenClaw for the rest of us? That’s the idea of a new startup offering an AI agent that you can access via iMessage, SMS, Telegram and, in some markets, WhatsApp.
The AI agent Poke launched public in March, allowing consumers to access a personal assistant who can take action on their behalf through a familiar interface. Today, Poke can help with everyday needs like daily planning, managing your calendar, tracking your health and fitness, controlling your smart home, editing your photos, and more, all via text message.
While you can still interact with a general-purpose AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude when you have questions or want to do research, you’ll turn to Poke when you want to get something done quickly or when you want to automate a task to save time.
For example, you could ask Poke to notify you of specific emails (like those from your family or your boss) or remind you in the morning if you need to take an umbrella with you. It could help you track your health and fitness goals or let you know the score of yesterday’s game. Poke could send daily medication reminders or tell you about the day’s news and more, as users can write their own automations in plain text and then share them with friends.
Backed by Spark Capital, General Catalyst and other angels, the 10-person startup recently added another $10 million to its funding, on top of last year’s $15 million seed round. It is now valued at $300 million, after money.
The tool comes as demand for AI systems soars, leading OpenAI to arrest OpenClaw creator and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to warn that every company needs its own OpenClaw strategy when announcing Nvidia’s enterprise-grade alternative.
But for the less technically inclined, the prospect of installing software through the terminal, managing dependencies, and dealing with errors is daunting. Additionally, systems like OpenClaw raise security concerns due to their deep system access.
For many people, then, OpenClaw and other agent systems still feel out of reach. The team behind Poke wants to change that.
Marvin von Hagenits co-founder The Interaction Company of Californiathe Palo Alto-based startup behind the new AI agent, tells TechCrunch that Poke came about by watching how beta testers used the company’s previous product, an AI assistant for email, built about a year ago.
“What we noticed there was that people wanted to use Poke for everything… Even though it was just for email, people started asking Poke to remind them to take their medicine. They asked Poke for sports results—’Hey Poke, tell me every morning if I need a jacket or not,'” explains von Hagen. “And at the time, we didn’t have a lot of that functionality, but we noticed how we had to we become mainstream much faster because people like personality and human nature so much.”
The team then partially pivoted and focused on making Poke more useful, proactive, and more versatile.
Unlike OpenClaw, getting started with Poke is easy. Just visit Poke.com, click “Get Started” and enter your phone number. There is no app to install as the assistant works via text messages.
Under the hood, Poke turns to the AI model that best fits the job, whether it’s a model from one of the big AI providers or an open source model.
“I think this is also one of our main advantages in the long term: that almost all of our competitors are just big tech and labs tied to a specific provider. Like Meta AI will only ever be able to use Meta models and ChatGPT will only ever be able to use OpenAI models,” von Hagen points out.
To work on messaging platforms like iMessage, Poke also leverages Linq, a solution that allows AI assistants to live inside messaging apps. The app can also run over SMS and Telegram, but WhatsApp support is currently limited as Meta banned other general-purpose chatbots last fall.
But that could change. Regulators from the EU, Italy and Brazil opened antitrust investigations to fight this decision, which brought Poke back to Brazil. Hopefully it will also allow Poke to work on WhatsApp in the EU when Meta lowers the cost. (Meta has disputed the high fees it charges — von Hagen says it’s a form of “malicious compliance” that he believes will soon be addressed.)
At launch, Poke offers a variety of “recipes” — or pre-built tools that help you automate various aspects of your life or work. These cover categories such as health and wellness, productivity, finance, scheduling, travel, home, school, email, community, and, for the techies, developer tools. Installing them requires a click of a button and then a standard authorization process if needed.
These recipes are designed to work with apps and services you already know, like Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, Notion, Linear, Granola, and more. There are health and fitness “recipes” that work with Strava, Withings, Oura, Fitbit and more, as well as those that work with smart home devices from companies like Philips Hue and Sonos.
Developers using Poke can also automate parts of their workflow through integrations with tools like PostHog, Webflow, Supabase, Vercel, Devin, Sentry, GitHub, Cursor Cloud Agents, and more.
Poke’s security model is multi-layered and includes regular penetration testing, security audits, various tools, and restrictive permissions for both agents and human employees. By default, the team can’t see anything inside the tokens unless the user manually chooses to provide access to a log file or analytics by flipping a switch in their settings to opt in to sharing that information. (TechCrunch hasn’t done its own security audit, to be clear.)
In the last two weeks, Poke users they’ve created thousands more recipes and automations, which the company plans to add to its list of recipes to discover in the near future. It also encourages creators to make these shareable recipes, offering to pay somewhere between 10 cents and a dollar (based on geography) for each user who signs up for Poke through the recipe.
The cost of using Poke is surprisingly affordable: it’s free to start, then pricing is flexible. During beta testing, users actually had to negotiate with the AI agent what price they would pay per month, which ranged between $10 and $30 — or so Poke told us in response to this question.
Von Hagen says that, now, pricing is based on how the AI agent is used. If you’re asking for things that don’t require real-time data, you could probably use Poke for free. What makes Poke money is real-time inference, like the automations that run on every incoming email or flight check-in in real-time. To set prices, the company gave Poke guidance on how expensive things are, which allows it to set personalized prices.
While the company has been able to make Poke more efficient to cut costs, the goal right now isn’t profitability, von Hagen notes.
“We don’t really want to make money, but we really want to grow. We want to build a product for a billion people, and monetization is really secondary,” he says. “The goal for the next few weeks and months now is to bring Poke into everyday life.” To do this, it will look to creators and influencers to demonstrate how they use Poke.
The company, co-founded by Felix Schlegeldoesn’t share how many customers have signed up, other than that the number has increased 10-fold in the past two months. (However, we spotted Poke on top of it Vercel’s AI Gateway Leaderboardfor what it’s worth.)
In addition to its main institutional investors, Spark Capital and General Catalyst, the startup has attracted the attention of several angels, including John and Patrick Collison (founders of Stripe), Jake and Logan Paul, Logan Kilpatrick from DeepMind, Joanne Jang of OpenAI, and Scott Wu and Walden Yan (founders of Cognition).
It also included Vercel co-founder Guillermo Rauch, PayPal co-founder Ken Howery, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, Mercor co-founder Brendan Foody, Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf, Flapping Airplanes co-founder Ben Spector and several others.
