Cognition acquires Poke to bring AI personality to Devin

AI coding startup Cognition has acquired The Interaction Company of California, the maker of AI assistant Poke, in a deal valuing the startup in the “low nine figures,” Cognition said. The deal will bring Poke’s interaction model and personality to Cognition’s coding assistant Devin, while Poke will draw on Cognition’s models and infrastructure to become faster and more reliable. Unlike a typical assistant, Poke chats with users more like a friend than a tool — incorporating slang and humor into its responses, a style Cognition wants to carry over to Devin.

“You probably prefer it if you have co-workers that have personality, rather than if you have co-workers that are just robots,” Interaction Company co-founder Marvin von Hagen told TechCrunch, confirming the deal’s price. He added that co-workers who are also software engineers can make a joke you’ll find funny and enjoyable. Cognition co-founder Scott Wu wrote in a blog post that the Interaction team has built an agent people love — proactive, familiar with its users, and fun to talk to — and that this is exactly how working with Devin should feel now that the teams get to build it together. Wu noted that he and Cognition co-founder Walden Yan had been angel investors in the company behind Poke.

Poke, which launched in March 2026, lets users interact with its AI agent through their messaging platform of choice — iMessage, SMS, Telegram, or, in some markets, WhatsApp — for tasks spanning travel, health, finance, scheduling, and education; von Hagen said productivity tasks like managing emails, reminders, and to-dos were among the most common uses. Over the past three months, Poke users exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform, Cognition said. But despite being used by hundreds of thousands of people, Poke had been expensive to run, making it difficult to turn a profit, according to von Hagen. In June, Poke became the first AI agent approved to run on Apple’s Messages for Business platform, which standardizes how businesses handle customer communications within Apple’s Messages app.

Nothing will immediately change for Poke through the end of the year, and it plans to remain on Apple’s platform. Next year, the team will experiment with combining the two products — Poke will turn to Cognition’s newest software engineering model, SWE-1.7, for some tasks, and fully merging the products hasn’t been ruled out. Von Hagen said that in the long term, Poke could become more reliable at orchestrating coding tasks while Devin becomes more like Poke — noting that Devin can currently handle only one pull request at a time, and that there’s value in having Poke orchestrate multiple Devin sessions and act as a persistent co-worker.

Why it matters

The deal signals that AI companies increasingly see interaction style — not just model capability — as a competitive differentiator, and it points toward coding agents that behave less like software and more like collaborators.