Cognition, an AI coding startup, has acquired The Interaction Company of California, the developer of Poke, a conversational AI assistant designed to chat like a friend. The acquisition values the startup in the “low nine figures,” according to reporting and statements from the companies.
What the deal changes — and what won’t change immediately
Under the agreement, Poke’s interaction model and personality will be integrated into Cognition’s coding assistant, Devin. At the same time, Poke will migrate to Cognition’s models and infrastructure to gain speed and reliability, Cognition said. The companies expect no immediate changes for Poke users through the end of the year; Poke will remain on Apple’s platform.
Longer term, the teams plan experiments to see how Poke and Devin can improve each other’s capabilities, and a full combination of the products has not been ruled out.
Why Poke matters to users and to Cognition
Poke distinguishes itself by the way it engages users: rather than acting like a dry tool, it responds in a friend-like, conversational style, often using slang and humor. Marvin von Hagen, co-founder of The Interaction Company of California, told TechCrunch that people often prefer coworkers with personality instead of “robots,” and that software engineers who can joke make interactions more enjoyable.
Cognition co-founder Scott Wu wrote in a blog post that the Interaction team built an agent people love: proactive, familiar with the user, and fun to talk to — exactly the user experience they want Devin to have. Wu also noted that he and Cognition co-founder Walden Yan were angel investors in the company behind Poke.
Usage, costs, and technical migration
Poke launched in March 2026 and lets users interact with its agent via their preferred messaging platform — iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and in some markets WhatsApp. Users employ Poke for a variety of tasks across travel, health, finance, scheduling and education; von Hagen said productivity tasks such as managing email, reminders and to-dos are among the most common use cases.
Cognition said Poke users exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform over the past three months. Von Hagen also acknowledged that running Poke had been expensive, which made profitability challenging.
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 inside Apple Messages.
Technical details and next steps
Next year, the teams will experiment with improvements that leverage Cognition’s newest software engineering model, SWE-1.7, for some tasks performed by Poke. The companies have not ruled out fully combining the two products.
Von Hagen suggested that Poke could better orchestrate multiple coding tasks over time while Devin could adopt more of Poke’s personable qualities. He noted that Devin currently can only handle one pull request at a time; orchestrating multiple Devin sessions and enabling task memory across sessions could add value.
"It would be good to have a persistent co-worker," von Hagen added.
Conclusion
The acquisition signals a growing conviction that the way AI assistants interact with people — their personality and conversational style — can be as valuable as the underlying models. In the short term, the deal aims to improve stability and scalability for Poke; in the longer term, closer integration with Devin could create new workflows and orchestration capabilities.
