Cognition just bought Poke.
The price? Low nine figures. A solid sum for an AI assistant that chats like a buddy instead of a bot.
This isn’t just about code. It’s about how we talk to machines.
Poke, developed by The Interaction Company of California, was known for one thing: it didn’t sound like a spreadsheet. It had slang. Humor. A vibe. Cognition, the startup behind the serious coding agent Devin, saw something there. Something they need.
The deal merges Poke’s social interaction model with Devin’s technical horsepower. Cognition gets the personality. Poke gets Cognition’s faster models and beefier infrastructure.
It’s a marriage of convenience and character.
Why personality beats pure power
You probably prefer coworkers with a personality. Not robots. Real people who can drop a joke when the code breaks.
That’s what Marvin von Hagen, co-founder of The Interaction Company, told TechCrunch. He confirmed the deal’s value while explaining the logic.
“When you have co-workers that are even software engineers, they can also make a funny comment. And you’ll find it interesting and enjoyable.”
This acquisition signals a shift.
We are moving past the era where raw computational power is the only metric that matters. How an AI feels to use is becoming a feature in itself.
Scott Wu, Cognition’s co-founder, put it plainly. The Interaction Team built an agent people actually like. It’s proactive. It knows you. It’s fun.
That is exactly what working with Devin should feel like. Now, they get to build it together.
Wu and fellow co-founder Walden Yan had already bet on Poke early as angel investors. This acquisition just cashed out that conviction.
How Poke changed user interaction
Poke launched in March 2026. A recent debut in the fast-moving AI space.
Users engaged through their preferred messaging apps. iMessage. SMS. Telegram. WhatsApp in select markets.
The tasks were mundane but high-frequency. Travel planning. Health checks. Finance tracking. Scheduling. Education.
But the heavy lifters were productivity basics. Managing emails. Setting reminders. Sorting to-do lists.
Over three months, users exchanged over 100 million messages. That is a lot of chatter.
Yet, despite hundreds of thousands of active users, the business model was fragile. Running the service was expensive. Profitability remained elusive.
In June 2026, they made history. Poke became the first AI agent approved to run on Apple’s Messages for Businesses platform. This gave them a standardized, reliable way to handle customer communication within the Apple ecosystem. A significant trust marker.
What happens next with Devin and Poke
Nothing changes for users through the end of the year. Poke stays on Apple’s platform. The experience remains familiar.
But look closely at 2027.
That’s when the real integration begins. Poke will start testing Cognition’s new software engineering model, SWE-1.7. For specific tasks. Not all at once.
Fully merging the products is on the table.
Von Hagen sees a clear future here. Poke can orchestrate Devin’s coding tasks with more reliability. Meanwhile, Devin could adopt Poke’s conversational flair.
Right now, Devin handles one pull request at a time. A bottleneck for complex projects.
“I think there is a lot of value in having Poke organize different Devin sessions,” von Hagen noted.
And memory. Persistent memory.
Devin currently forgets context between sessions. Poke could bridge that gap. It could remember the task from three days ago. Keep the thread alive.
“It would be good to have a persistent coworker,” he added.
Not a tool that resets every time you close the window. A colleague that shows up and remembers what you did yesterday.
The lines between assistant and partner are blurring. We want machines that get us. Not just machines that work.
Cognition bet on that desire. The price was low nine figures. But the potential value? Infinite.
If Devin starts cracking jokes while refactoring your backend, will you notice? Or will you just appreciate that it remembered to back up your files first?
