Cognition Acquires Poke: Conversational AI at Stake

Cognition Acquires Poke: Conversational AI at Play

Poke, the AI assistant you chat with like a friend, is making a significant leap forward. The company behind this assistant, The Interaction Company of California, has been acquired by the AI coding startup Cognition in a deal valuing the startup at a "low nine-figure" amount.

This agreement will allow for the integration of Poke's interaction model and personality into Cognition's coding assistant Devin. At the same time, Poke will benefit from Cognition's models and infrastructure to become faster and more reliable, according to statements from Cognition.

What makes Poke appealing to consumers—and now to its acquirer—is its way of interacting with user requests. Instead of functioning as a tool, Poke engages in a more familiar manner with users, responding like a friend and even incorporating slang and humor into its interactions. This could add value to the coding agent Devin.

"You probably prefer to have colleagues with personality rather than colleagues who are just robots," explained Marvin von Hagen, co-founder of The Interaction Company, in an interview with TechCrunch, where he also confirmed the deal's price. "When you have colleagues who are also software engineers, they can also make a joke. And you find that funny and enjoyable."

The acquisition underscores a growing belief that the way AI assistants interact with users will become just as valuable as the underlying models that power them. 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 enjoyable to use. That’s exactly what working with Devin should feel like, and now we’re going to build it together," wrote Scott Wu, co-founder of Cognition, in a blog post.

He also noted that he and Cognition co-founder Walden Yan had been angel investors in the company behind Poke.

Launched for the first time in March 2026, Poke allows users to interact with its AI agent via their preferred messaging platform, whether it’s iMessage, SMS, Telegram, or, in some markets, WhatsApp. People use Poke for a variety of tasks across categories such as travel, health, finance, planning, and education.

Von Hagen noted that productivity tasks like managing emails, reminders, and to-do lists were among the most common use cases for Poke.

Over the past three months, Poke users have exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform, according to Cognition. However, despite being used by hundreds of thousands of people, Poke was expensive to operate, making profitability challenging, von Hagen stated.

In June, Poke became the first AI agent approved to operate on Apple’s Messages for Business platform, which provides businesses with a standardized experience for managing their communications with customers within Apple’s Messages app.

In the future, nothing will change immediately for Poke by the end of the year, we were told. Poke plans to remain on Apple’s platform.

However, next year, the team will experiment with how Poke and Devin can improve, with Poke turning to Cognition's latest software engineering model, SWE-1.7, for certain tasks. The possibility of fully combining the two products is also not ruled out.

"I think in the long term, Poke can be more reliable for orchestrating all these coding tasks... and at the same time, Devin could become more like Poke," von Hagen said. "Right now, Devin can only handle one PR—pull request—at a time... I think there’s a lot of value in having Poke orchestrate different sessions of Devin." Additionally, Poke could help Devin remember tasks across different sessions.

"It would be nice to have a persistent colleague," he added.