Why Cognition bought Poke: AI personality is becoming a competitive advantage

Poke, the AI ​​assistant that sends text as a friend, is making the next big move. The company behind the assistant, The Interaction Company of California, has been acquired by AI startup Cognition in a deal that values ​​the startup in the “low nine figures.”

The deal will bring Poke’s human interaction model to Cognition’s code assistant Devin. Meanwhile, Poke will use Cognition’s models and infrastructure to be faster and more reliable, Cognition said.

What makes Poke interesting to consumers – and now, to its finder – is how it interacts with user requests. Instead of acting like a tool, Poke chats familiarly with users, responds like a friend and injects slang and humor into its interactions. That is something that would add value to Devin’s code agent.

“You’d probably rather have human co-workers, rather than robotic co-workers,” explained Interaction Company founder Marvin von Hagen, in an interview with TechCrunch, where he also confirmed the price. “If you have co-workers who are software engineers, they can make a joke too. And you’ll find it funny and entertaining.”

The findings underscore the growing belief that how AI assistants interact with users will be as important as the underlying models that empower them. Cognition wants to make Devin feel less like software and more like a partner.

“The Interaction team built an agent that people love: it’s fast, capable, and fun to talk to. That’s exactly what working with Devin should feel like, and now we’re starting to build it together,” Cognition founder Scott Wu wrote in a blog post.

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

First launched in March 2026, Poke allows users to interact with its AI agent through their messaging platform of choice, whether that’s iMessage, SMS, Telegram, or, in some markets, WhatsApp. People use Poke to perform various tasks, in all categories such as travel, health, finance, planning, and education.

Von Hagen noted that productivity tasks such as managing emails, reminders, and to-dos were among Poke’s most common use cases.

In the past three months, Poke users have exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform, Cognition said. But despite being used by hundreds of thousands of people, Poke was too expensive to run, making it difficult to turn a profit, von Hagen said.

In June, Poke became the first AI agent to be approved to run on Apple’s Messages for Business platform, giving businesses a common experience for managing their customer communications within Apple’s Messages app.

Moving forward, nothing will change immediately for Poke by the end of the year, we’re told. Poke plans to stay on the Apple platform.

However, next year the team will test how both Poke and Devin can improve, with Poke turning to the newest Cognition software engineering model SWE-1.7 for some tasks. Fully combining these two products was not ruled out, either.

“I think in the long run Poke can be more reliable by programming all these codes [tasks]…and, at the same time, Devin can be like Poke,” said von Hagen. “Currently, Devin can make one PR request – a pull – at a time… Also, Poke can help Devin remember tasks in different sessions.

“It would be nice to have a co-worker who is persistent,” he added.