Cognition's acquisition of The Interaction Company of California, the company behind Poke, shows how quickly the AI assistant market is moving beyond raw model capability. The deal values the startup in the "low nine figures" and gives Cognition access to a product known less for acting like a traditional tool and more for chatting with users like a friend.
For Cognition, the logic is direct: Poke's interaction model and personality can help make Devin, its coding assistant, feel more like a colleague. For Poke, Cognition said the benefit is access to models and infrastructure that could make the assistant faster and more reliable.
Why Poke stood out
Poke first launched in March 2026 with a simple idea: users should be able to talk to an AI agent through the messaging platform they already use. It supports iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and, in some markets, WhatsApp.
That distribution matters, but the more important part is how Poke communicates. Rather than behaving like a formal software interface, it responds in a familiar way, including slang and humor. Users engage with it across travel, health, finance, scheduling, and education, while productivity tasks such as managing emails, reminders, and to-dos have been among its most common use cases.
The scale is already notable. Over the past three months, Poke users exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform, Cognition said. The product has been used by hundreds of thousands of people, but it was also expensive to run, which made profitability difficult, according to Marvin von Hagen.
Personality becomes part of the product
The acquisition reflects a broader shift in how AI assistants are being evaluated. The underlying model still matters, but the user experience around that model is becoming a competitive factor in its own right.
That is especially relevant for coding agents. A coding assistant is not only answering a question; it may be working across tasks, sessions, and decisions that resemble collaboration. Cognition's goal is to make Devin feel less like software and more like a colleague.
"You probably prefer it if you have co-workers that have personality, rather than if you have co-workers that are just robots," explained Interaction Company co-founder Marvin von Hagen in an interview with TechCrunch, where he also confirmed the deal's price. "When you have co-workers that are also software engineers, they can also make a joke. And you'll find it funny and enjoyable."
Cognition co-founder Scott Wu framed the deal in similar terms in a blog post. He wrote that The Interaction team had built an agent people love because it is proactive, knows the user, and is fun to talk to. He said that is how working with Devin should feel.
Wu also noted that he and Cognition co-founder Walden Yan had been angel investors in the company behind Poke.
What changes now
For existing Poke users, the short-term message is continuity. Nothing is expected to immediately change for Poke through the end of the year. The company also plans to remain on Apple's platform.
That Apple relationship is significant within the facts of the deal. In June, Poke became the first AI agent to be approved to run on Apple's Messages for Business platform, which gives businesses a standardized way to manage customer communications inside Apple's Messages app.
The more experimental phase is expected next year. The team plans to explore how both Poke and Devin can improve, including by having Poke use Cognition's newest software engineering model SWE-1.7 for some tasks. A full combination of the two products has not been ruled out.
How Poke and Devin could work together
The clearest near-term product idea is that Poke could become a conversational layer that helps coordinate coding work. Von Hagen suggested that Poke could become more reliable at orchestrating coding tasks, while Devin could become more like Poke.
He also pointed to a specific limitation in Devin's current workflow: Devin can only do one PR, or pull request, at a time. In that context, Poke could potentially help orchestrate different Devin sessions and remember tasks across sessions.
"It would be good to have a persistent co-worker," he added.
That phrase captures the strategic value Cognition appears to be pursuing. A coding agent that remembers context, coordinates work, and communicates naturally may feel less like a command-line utility and more like an ongoing teammate. Poke gives Cognition a tested interaction model for that direction, while Cognition gives Poke a stronger technical foundation for reliability and speed.
The result is not just another AI acquisition. It is a bet that the next generation of AI assistants will compete on how they work with people, not only on what they can compute.