Poke, the AI assistant you text like a friend, is making its next big move. The company behind the assistant, The Interaction Company of Californiaacquired by coding startup AI Cognition in a deal that values the startup in the “low nine figures.”
The deal will bring Poke’s interaction model and personality to Cognition’s coding assistant Devin. Meanwhile, Poke will leverage Cognition’s models and infrastructure to become faster and more reliable, Cognition said.
What makes Poke interesting to consumers — and now, to its buyer — is how it deals with user requests. Rather than acting like a tool, Poke converses more intimately with users, responding like a friend and even incorporating slang and humor into its interactions. This is something that could add value to Devin’s encoding agent.
“You probably prefer it if you have colleagues who have personality, rather than if you have colleagues who are just robots,” explained the co-founder of the Interaction Company. Marvin von Hagen in an interview with TechCrunch, where he also confirmed the price of the deal. “When you have colleagues who are also software engineers, they can also crack a joke. And you’ll find it funny and enjoyable.”
The acquisition underscores the growing belief that the way AI assistants interact with users will become as valuable as the underlying models that power them. Cognition wants to make Devin feel less like software and more like a colleague.
“The Interaction team has created an agent that people love: it’s proactive, it knows you, and it’s fun to talk to. That’s exactly what working with Devin should feel like, and now we can build it together,” wrote Cognition co-founder Scott Wu. blog post.
He also noted that he and Cognition co-founder Walden Yan were angel investors in the company behind Poke.
First released in March 2026, Poke allows users to interact with the AI agent via their messaging platform of choice, be it iMessage, SMS, Telegram or, in some markets, WhatsApp. People use Poke to a variety of tasks in categories such as travel, health, finance, planning and education.
Von Hagen noted that productivity tasks such as email management, reminders and to-dos were among the most common use cases for Poke.
In the past three months, Poke users have exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform, Cognition reported. But despite being used by hundreds of thousands of people, Poke was expensive to run, making it difficult to make a profit, von Hagen said.
In June, Poke became the first AI agent approved to run on Apple’s Messaging for Business platform, which provides businesses with a standardized experience for handling communications with their customers within Apple’s Messages app.
Going forward, nothing will directly change for Poke until the end of the year, we’re told. Poke plans to stay on Apple’s platform.
However, over the next year the team will experiment with how both Poke and Devin can be improved, with Poke turning to Cognition’s newer software engineering model SWE-1.7 for some tasks. The complete combination of the two products has not been ruled out either.
“I think in the long run Poke can be more reliable by orchestrating all these encodings [tasks] … and, at the same time, Devin could become more like Poke,” von Hagen said. “As it stands right now, Devin can only do one PR — pull request — at a time… I think there’s a lot of value in having Poke orchestrate different Devin sessions.” Additionally, Poke could help Devin remember tasks across sessions.
“It would be good to have a persistent colleague,” he added.
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