Why Cognition bought Poke: AI personality becomes a competitive advantage

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

The deal will bring the Poke interaction model and character to Devin, a programming assistant at Cognition. At the same time, Poke will leverage Cognition’s models and infrastructure to become faster and more reliable, Cognition said.

What makes Poke interesting for consumers — and now for the company acquiring it — is how it reacts to user requests. Instead of acting as a tool, Poke chats familiarly with users, responding as a friend and even incorporating slang and humor into its interactions. This is something that could add value to Devin’s programming agent.

“You would probably prefer it if you had coworkers with personality, rather than having coworkers who are just robots,” Marvin von Hagen, co-founder of Interaction Company, explained in an interview with TechCrunch, where he also confirmed the price of the deal. “When you have coworkers who are also software engineers, they can also tell a joke. You will find it funny and interesting.”

The acquisition underscores the growing belief that how AI assistants interact with users will become as valuable as the underlying models that power them. Cognition wants to make Devin feel less like software and more like a colleague.

“The Interaction team has built an agent that people love: they’re proactive, they know you, and they’re fun to talk to. This is exactly what working with Devin should feel like, and now we get to build it together,” Scott Wu, co-founder of Cognition, 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 the messaging platform of their choice, be it iMessage, SMS, Telegram, or WhatsApp in some markets. People use Poke for a variety of tasks, across categories like travel, health, finance, scheduling, and education.

Von Hagen noted that productivity tasks like managing emails, reminders, and tasks were among the most popular use cases for Poke.

Over 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 expensive to operate, making it difficult to turn a profit, von Hagen said.

In June, Poke became the first AI agent approved to run on Apple’s business messaging platform, which provides businesses with a unified experience for handling their customers’ communications within Apple’s Messages app.

From now on, nothing will change immediately for Poke until the end of the year, we’re told. Poke plans to stay on the Apple platform.

However, next year the team will test how to improve both Poke and Devin, with Poke switching to Cognition’s latest software engineering model SWE-1.7 for some tasks. A complete combination of the two products has not been ruled out either.

“I think Poke can be more reliable in the long run by coordinating all of these encodings [tasks]“…At the same time, Devin could become more like Poke,” von Hagen said. “As it stands now, Devin can only do one PR — a pull request — at a time… I think there’s a lot of value in having Poke coordinate different Devin sessions.” Additionally, Poke can help Devin remember tasks across different sessions.

“It would be nice to have a diligent coworker,” he added.