The Poke AI agent makes setting up automations as easy as sending a text message

Is Poke the OpenClaw for the rest of us? That’s the idea coming from a new startup offering an AI agent that you can access via iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and in some markets, WhatsApp.

The Poke AI agent launched publicly in March, allowing consumers to access a personal assistant that can take actions on their behalf through a familiar interface. Today, Poke can help with everyday needs, like daily planning, managing your calendar, tracking your health and fitness, controlling your smart home, editing your photos, and more, all via text message.

Although you can still interact with a general-purpose AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude when you have questions or want to do research, you’ll turn to Poke when you want to get something done quickly, or when you want to automate some tasks to save time.

For example, you can ask Poke to alert you to certain emails (such as those from your family or your boss), or to remind you in the morning if you need to take an umbrella with you. This can help you track your health and fitness goals, or let you know the score of last night’s game. Poke can send daily medication reminders, check out the day’s news, and more, as users can write their own automations in plain text and then share them with friends.

Backed by Spark Capital, General Catalyst and other angel investors, the 10-person startup recently added another $10 million to its coffers, on top of last year’s $15 million seed round. It is now worth $300 million, after money.

The tool arrives as demand for agent AI systems grows, prompting an acquisition by OpenClaw creator OpenAI, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warning that every company needs its own OpenClaw strategy when announcing an enterprise-level Nvidia replacement.

But for those who are not technically inclined, the prospect of having to install software through the device, manage dependencies, and troubleshoot problems is daunting. Additionally, systems like OpenClaw raise security concerns due to their deep access to the system.

For many people, OpenClaw and other proxy systems still seem out of reach. The team behind Poke wants to change that.

Marvin von Hagen, co-founder of Interaction Company of California, the Palo Alto-based startup behind the new AI agent, tells TechCrunch that Poke emerged from watching how beta testers used the company’s previous product, an AI assistant for email, which was created about a year ago.

“What we noticed there was that people wanted to use Poke for everything…and even though it was just for email, people started asking Poke to remind them to take their medication. They asked Poke about sports scores — ‘Hey Poke, tell me every morning if you need a jacket or not,'” von Hagen explains. “And at the time, we didn’t have a lot of those functions, but we noticed how we needed to become general-purpose much more quickly, because people like personality and humanity so much.”

The team then partially pivoted and focused on making Poke more useful, proactive, and more engaging.

Unlike OpenClaw, getting started with Poke is easy. Simply visit Poke.com, click Get Started, and enter your phone number. There is no app to install as the assistant works via text messages.

Under the hood, Poke turns to the AI ​​model that best suits the task, whether that’s a model from one of the major AI providers or an open source model.

“I think this is also one of our main strengths in the long term: almost all of our competitors are just big tech companies and labs tied to a particular provider. Like Meta AI, it will only be able to use Meta models, and ChatGPT will only be able to use OpenAI models,” von Hagen points out.

To work across messaging platforms like iMessage, Poke also leverages Linq, a solution that enables AI assistants to live inside messaging apps. The app can be run through SMS and Telegram as well, but WhatsApp support is currently limited as Meta banned other general-purpose chatbots last fall.

But this could change. Regulators from the European Union, Italy and Brazil opened antitrust investigations to fight the decision, which brought Bock back to Brazil. We also hope that Poke will be allowed to run on WhatsApp in the EU when Meta cuts costs. (Meta has seen pushback over the high fees it charges, with von Hagen saying this is a form of “harmful compliance” that he believes will soon be addressed.)

At launch, Poke offers a variety of “recipes” — or pre-made tools that help you automate different aspects of your life or business. These include categories like Health & Wellness, Productivity, Finance, Scheduling, Travel, Home, School, Email, Community, and Developer Tools for those technical ones. Installing them requires a click of a button and then a standard licensing process, if necessary.

These recipes are designed to work with apps and services you already know, like Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, Notion, Linear, Granola, and more. There are health and fitness “recipes” that work with Strava, Withings, Ora, Fitbit and others, as well as ones that work with smart home devices from companies like Philips Hue and Sonos.

Developers using Poke can also automate parts of their workflow via integrations with tools like PostHog, Webflow, Supabase, Vercel, Devin, Sentry, GitHub, Cursor Cloud Agents, and others.

Poke’s security model is multi-layered and includes regular penetration testing, security checks, various tools, and restricted permissions for both agents and human employees. By default, the team cannot see anything inside the tokens, unless the user manually chooses to provide access to a log file or analytics by tapping the switch in their settings to choose to share this information. (TechCrunch did not conduct its own security audit, to be clear.)

Over the past two weeks, Poke users have created thousands of recipes and other automations, which the company plans to add to its recipe guide for discovery in the near future. It also encourages creators to create these shareable recipes by offering to pay between 10 cents and a dollar (based on geography) for each user who signs up for Poke via the recipe.

The cost of using Poke is surprisingly affordable: it’s free to get started, and then pricing is flexible. During the beta tests, users actually had to negotiate with an AI agent the price they would pay per month, which ranged from $10 to $30 — or so Poke told us in response to this question.

Von Hagen says pricing now depends on how the AI ​​agent is used. If you’re ordering things that don’t require real-time data, you can probably use Poke for free. What costs Poke money is real-time heuristics, such as automation that runs on every incoming email or flight check-in in real time. To set prices, the company provided guidance to Poke on how much things cost, allowing it to set personalized prices.

While the company has managed to make Poke more efficient to cut costs, the goal now is not profitability, von Hagen points out.

“We don’t really want to make money, but we really want to grow,” he says. “We want to build a product for a billion people, and monetization is really secondary.” “The goal for the coming weeks and months now is to bring Poke into everyday life.” To do this, creators and influencers will look to showcase how they use Poke.

The company, co-founded by Felix Schlegel, doesn’t share how many customers have signed up, other than to note that the number has increased 10-fold over the past two months. (However, we did spot Poke at the top of Vercel’s AI Gateway leaderboard, for whatever that’s worth.)

In addition to its main institutional investors, Spark Capital and General Catalyst, the startup has attracted the attention of a number of angel investors, including John and Patrick Collison (founders of Stripe), Jake and Logan Paul, DeepMind’s Logan Kilpatrick, OpenAI’s Guan Zhang, and Scott Wu and Walden Yan (cognition founders).

It also included Vercel co-founder Guillermo Rauch, PayPal co-founder Ken Howery, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, Mercor co-founder Brendan Foudy, Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolff, Flapping Airplanes co-founder Ben Spector, and many others.