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

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

The AI ​​agent Poke launched made public in March, giving consumers access to a personal assistant who can take action on their behalf through a familiar interface. Today, Poke can help with everyday needs such as daily planning, managing your calendar, tracking your health and fitness, controlling your smart home, editing your photos and more, all via SMS.

While you can still interact with a general AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude if you have questions or want to do research, you might turn to Poke if you want to get something done quickly, or if you want to automate a task to save time.

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

Backed by Spark Capital, General Catalyst and other angels, 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 valued at $300 million, post-money.

The tool comes at a time when demand for agentic AI systems is increasing, leading to OpenAI snapping up the maker of OpenClaw, and Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang is warning that every company needs its own OpenClaw strategy in announcing Nvidia’s enterprise alternative.

But for those who are less tech-savvy, the prospect of having to install software via the terminal, manage dependencies, and troubleshoot errors is daunting. Furthermore, systems like OpenClaw cause security issues due to deep system access.

So for many people, OpenClaw and other agent systems still feel out of reach. The team behind Poke wants to change that.

Marvin von Hagenco-founder of The Interaction Company of Californiathe Palo Alto-based startup behind the new AI agent, tells TechCrunch that Poke grew out of watching beta testers use the company’s previous product, an AI assistant for email, built about a year ago.

“What we noticed there was that people wanted to use Poke for everything… Even though it was just for email, people started asking Poke to remind them to take their medicine. They asked Poke about sports results – ‘Hey Poke, tell me every morning if I need a jacket or not,'” Von Hagen explains. “And at the time we didn’t have a lot of this functionality, but we noticed that we needed to go general-purpose much faster because people like the personality and the humanity of it so much.”

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

Unlike OpenClaw, getting started with Poke is easy. You simply go to Poke.com, click ‘Get Started’ and enter your phone number. No app needs to be installed, because the assistant works via SMS.

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

“I think this is also one of our key strengths in the long run: that almost all of our competitors are just big tech companies and labs tied to a specific provider. Like Meta AI 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 uses Linq, a solution that allows AI assistants to live within messaging apps. The app can also work via SMS and Telegram, but WhatsApp support is currently limited because Meta excluded other general chatbots last fall.

However, that could change. Regulators from the EU, Italy and Brazil have opened antitrust investigations to challenge this decision, which has brought Poke back to Brazil. It will also hopefully allow Poke to work on WhatsApp in the EU if Meta brings costs down. (Meta has seen criticism for the high fees it charges – von Hagen says it’s a form of “malicious compliance” that he believes will be addressed soon.)

At launch, Poke will offer a variety of “recipes” – or ready-made tools that will help you automate different aspects of your life or work. These include categories such as health and wellness, productivity, finance, planning, travel, home, school, email, community and, for those who are technical, developer tools. Installing them requires a click of a button and then, if necessary, a standard authorization process.

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

Developers using Poke can also automate parts of their workflow through 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 audits, various tools, and restrictive permissions for both agents and human workers. By default, the team cannot see anything in the tokens unless the user manually chooses to grant access to a log file or analytics by toggling a switch in the settings to share this information. (To be clear, TechCrunch did not conduct its own security audit.)

The past few weeks have Poke’s users has created thousands of recipes and automations, which the company plans to add to its recipe list for discovery in the near future. It also encourages creators to create these shareable recipes by offering to pay anywhere from 10 cents to a dollar (based on geographic location) for each user who signs up for Poke via the recipe.

The cost of using Poke is surprisingly affordable: getting started is free and prices are flexible. During the beta testing, users actually had to negotiate with the AI ​​agent the price they would pay per month, which ranged between $10 and $30 – Poke told us in response to this question.

Von Hagen says pricing is now based on how the AI ​​agent is used. If you’re asking for things that don’t require real-time data, you can probably use Poke for free. What Poke money costs is real-time inference, such as automations that run on every incoming email or real-time flight check-ins. To set prices, the company gave Poke advice on how expensive things are, allowing it to set personalized prices.

While the company has been able to make Poke more efficient to reduce costs, the goal at this point is not profitability, Von Hagen notes.

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

The company, co-founded by Felix Schlegeldoesn’t share how many customers have signed up, other than to say that figure has increased tenfold in recent months. (We saw Poke at the top, though Vercel’s AI Gateway Rankingfor whatever that’s worth.)

In addition to key institutional investors, Spark Capital and General Catalyst, the startup has attracted the attention of a number of angels, including John and Patrick Collison (founders of Stripe), Jake and Logan Paul, Logan Kilpatrick of DeepMind, Joannes Jang of OpenAI, and Scott Wu and Walden Yan (founders of Cognition).

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