Poke, the AI assistant that lets you text like a friend, is the next big thing. The California-based Interaction Company, which powers the assistant, was acquired by AI coding startup Cognition, valuing it in the “low nine digits.”
The deal brings Poke’s interaction model and personality to Cognition’s coding assistant, Devin. Meanwhile, Poke will leverage Cognition’s models and infrastructure to be faster and more reliable, Cognition said.
What’s interesting about Poke for consumers, and now for acquirers, is how it responds to user requests. Rather than acting like a tool, Poke Chat is more user-friendly, responding like a friend and even incorporating slang and humor into the dialogue. That’s something that could add value to Devin’s coding agency.
“You’d probably prefer to have a co-worker with a personality rather than just a robot co-worker,” Interaction Company co-founder Marvin von Hagen explained in an interview with TechCrunch, where he also confirmed the value of the deal. “If you have a colleague who is a software engineer, they can tell a joke too and find it funny and fun.”
The acquisition supports the growing belief that the way AI assistants interact with users will be just as valuable as the underlying models that power them. Cognition wants Devin to feel like a colleague, not software.
“The Interaction team has built agents that people love. Agents that are proactive, understand you, and are fun to talk to. That’s exactly what working with Devin feels like. Now we can build it together,” Cognition co-founder Scott Wu said in a blog post.
He also noted that he and Cognition co-founder Walden Yang were angel investors in Poke.
First released in March 2026, Poke allows users to work with AI agents through their messaging platform of choice, including iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and in some markets, WhatsApp. People use Poke for a variety of tasks across categories such as travel, health, finance, scheduling, education, and more.
Von Hagen noted that productivity tasks like email, reminders, and to-do management are among the most common use cases for Poke.
According to Cognition, Poke users have exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform in the past three months. But even though Poke is used by hundreds of thousands of people, it has been expensive to operate and 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, giving businesses a standardized experience for handling customer communications within Apple’s Messages app.
From now on, it is said that nothing will change anytime soon for Poke until the end of the year. Poke will remain on Apple’s platform.
However, next year the team plans to experiment with how both Poke and Devin can be improved, with Poke leveraging Cognition’s latest software engineering model, SWE-1.7, for some tasks. The possibility of combining the two products completely is also not ruled out.
“In the long run, I think coordinating all these coding[tasks]will make Poke even more reliable…and at the same time Devin could become more like Poke,” von Hagen said. “Like right now, Devin can only run 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 different sessions.
“It’s good to have colleagues who are tenacious,” he added.
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