AI coding startup Cognition has acquired Poke, a conversational AI assistant, in a deal valuing the company in the “low nine figures,” the companies confirmed on July 24, 2026. The deal brings Poke’s interaction model and personality to Cognition’s coding agent Devin, while Poke gains access to Cognition’s models and infrastructure to improve its speed and reliability.
Poke is built by The Interaction Company of California and allows users to interact with an AI agent through iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and WhatsApp. Launched in March 2026, the assistant responds in a conversational, familiar tone — incorporating humor and slang — and is used for tasks spanning travel, health, finance, scheduling, education, and productivity. Over the past three months, users exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform, according to Cognition.
Cognition co-founders Scott Wu and Walden Yan were previously angel investors in The Interaction Company. Wu described Poke as “proactive,” personable, and “fun to talk to” — qualities he said should define the experience of working with Devin.
Interaction Company co-founder Marvin von Hagen framed the rationale in workplace terms. “You probably prefer it if you have co-workers that have personality, rather than if you have co-workers that are just robots,” he told TechCrunch. He also noted that Poke had been costly to operate, making profitability difficult despite its large user base.
No immediate changes to Poke are planned through the end of 2026. Starting next year, the team will experiment with integrating Cognition’s SWE-1.7 software engineering model into Poke and explore how the two products could enhance each other. Von Hagen suggested Poke could eventually orchestrate multiple Devin sessions and help Devin retain context across tasks — a fully combined product has not been ruled out.
The acquisition reflects a growing view within the companies that the way AI assistants communicate with users may become as important as the underlying models powering them.
Source: TechCrunch