A New Era in AI Assistants: Cognition Acquires Poke

Poke, the revolutionary AI assistant that allows users to text with it like a friend, has made its next big move. The company behind Poke, The Interaction Company of California, has been acquired by AI coding startup Cognition in a deal valuing the startup in the ‘low nine figures.’

Source: techcrunch.com

The acquisition brings 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. According to Cognition, this deal underscores a growing belief that how AI assistants interact with users will become just as valuable as the underlying models powering them.

Co-founder of The Interaction Company, Marvin von Hagen, explained that users prefer interacting with AI assistants that have personality, rather than those that function like robots. ‘When you have co-workers that are also software engineers, they can also make a joke. And you’ll find it funny and enjoyable,’ he said.

The acquisition highlights Cognition’s ambition to make Devin feel less like software and more like a colleague. Cognition co-founder Scott Wu wrote in a blog post, ‘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.’

Wu and Cognition co-founder Walden Yan had previously been angel investors in The Interaction Company. This close relationship and shared vision likely contributed to the successful acquisition.

Poke, launched in March 2026, allows users to engage with its AI agent through their preferred messaging platform. The platform supports iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and, in some markets, WhatsApp. Users leverage Poke for a variety of tasks, including travel, health, finance, scheduling, and education. Productivity tasks like managing emails, reminders, and to-do lists are among Poke’s most common use cases.

Over the past three months, Poke users exchanged over 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. However, the acquisition by Cognition is expected to bring significant changes to Poke’s operations.

In June, Poke became the first AI agent to be approved to run on Apple’s Messages for Business platform, which provides businesses with a standardized experience for handling their customer communications within Apple’s Messages app. The platform’s approval will enable businesses to utilize Poke’s capabilities more seamlessly.

Looking forward, nothing will immediately change for Poke through the end of the year. However, next year, the team will experiment with how both Poke and Devin can improve. Poke will leverage Cognition’s newest software engineering model SWE-1.7 for some tasks. Fully combining the two products has not been ruled out.

Marvin von Hagen emphasized that Poke can become more reliable by orchestrating multiple coding tasks at once. Devin, on the other hand, could become more like Poke by incorporating its personality and humor into its interactions. ‘It would be good to have a persistent co-worker,’ he added.

Key Takeaways from the Acquisition

• Cognition acquired Poke, a revolutionary AI assistant that allows users to text with it like a friend.

• The acquisition brings Poke’s interaction model and personality to Cognition’s coding assistant Devin.

• Poke will leverage Cognition’s models and infrastructure to become faster and more reliable.

• The acquisition highlights Cognition’s ambition to make Devin feel less like software and more like a colleague.

• Poke’s capabilities will be integrated with Cognition’s software engineering model SWE-1.7 next year.