Poke, the AI assistant that users text like a friend, has been acquired by AI coding startup Cognition. The deal values The Interaction Company of California, the company behind Poke, in the low nine figures.
Cognition plans to bring Poke's interaction model and personality to its coding assistant Devin. Poke will also gain access to Cognition's models and infrastructure to become faster and more reliable, according to the company.
What Makes Poke Different
Poke stands out because of how it interacts with users. Instead of acting like a tool, it chats in a familiar way, responding like a friend and using slang and humor. This approach could add value to Devin's coding agent.
"You probably prefer it if you have co-workers that have personality, rather than if you have co-workers that are just robots," said Marvin von Hagen, co-founder of The Interaction Company, in an interview with TechCrunch. He also confirmed the deal's price. "When you have co-workers that are also software engineers, they can also make a joke. And you'll find it funny and enjoyable."
The acquisition highlights a growing belief that how AI assistants interact with users will become as important as the underlying models. Cognition wants Devin to feel less like software and more like a colleague.
"The Interaction team has built an agent that people love: it's proactive, it knows you, and it's fun to talk to. That's exactly how working with Devin should feel, and now we get to build it together," Cognition co-founder Scott Wu wrote in a blog post.
Wu also noted that he and Cognition co-founder Walden Yan had been angel investors in the company behind Poke.
Poke's Growth and Challenges
Poke launched in March 2026 and lets users interact with its AI agent through messaging platforms like iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and WhatsApp in some markets. People use Poke for tasks across travel, health, finance, scheduling, and education.
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Von Hagen said productivity tasks such as managing emails, reminders, and to-dos were among Poke's most common use cases.
Over the past three months, Poke users exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform, Cognition said. Despite being used by hundreds of thousands of people, Poke had been expensive to run, making it difficult to turn a profit, von Hagen said.
In June, Poke became the first AI agent approved to run on Apple's Messages for Business platform. That platform gives businesses a standardized experience for handling customer communications within Apple's Messages app.
What Comes Next
Nothing will change immediately for Poke through the end of the year, according to the company. Poke plans to remain on Apple's platform.
Next year, the team will experiment with improving both Poke and Devin. Poke will use Cognition's newest software engineering model, SWE-1.7, for some tasks. A full combination of the two products has not been ruled out.
"I think in the long term Poke can be more reliable with orchestrating all these coding [tasks]...and, at the same time, Devin could become more like Poke," von Hagen said. "Like 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." Poke could also help Devin remember tasks across different sessions.
"It would be good to have a persistent co-worker," he added.