Why Cognition bought Poke: AI personality is becoming a competitive advantage

Poke, the AI ​​assistant that texts you like a friend, is making its next big step. The company behind the assistant, The Interaction Company of Californiahas been bought by AI coding startup Cognition in a deal that values ​​the startup in the ‘low nine figures’.

The deal will bring Poke’s interaction model and personality to Cognition’s coding assistant Devin. Meanwhile, Poke will take advantage of Cognition’s models and infrastructure to become faster and more reliable, Cognition said.

What makes Poke interesting for consumers – and now also for buyers – is the way it handles user requests. Rather than functioning as a tool, Poke chats more familiarly with users, responds like a friend, and even integrates slang and humor into its interactions. That’s something that could add value to Devin’s coding agent.

“You probably prefer having colleagues with personalities than having colleagues who are just robots,” explains co-founder of Interaction Company. Marvin von Hagenin an interview with TechCrunch, where he also confirmed the price of the deal. “If you have colleagues who are also software engineers, they can also make a joke. And you find that funny and enjoyable.”

The acquisition underlines the growing belief that the way 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 built an agent that people love: he’s proactive, he knows you, and he’s fun to talk to. That’s exactly what working with Devin should feel like, and now we get to build him together,” Scott Wu, co-founder of Cognition, wrote in a blog post.

He also noted that he and Cognition co-founder Walden Yan had been angel investors in the company behind Poke.

First launched in March 2026, Poke allows users to interact with its AI agent via the messaging platform of their choice, whether that’s iMessage, SMS, Telegram or, in some markets, WhatsApp. People use Poke for one variety of tasksin categories such as travel, health, finance, planning and education.

Von Hagen noted that productivity tasks such as managing emails, reminders, and tasks were among Poke’s most common use cases.

In the past three months, Poke users have exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform, according to Cognition. But even though Poke was used by hundreds of thousands of people, it was expensive to use, making it difficult to turn a profit, Von Hagen said.

In June, Poke became the first AI agent approved for use on Apple’s Messages for Business platform, which provides businesses with a standardized experience for handling their customer communications within Apple’s Messages app.

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

Next year, however, the team will experiment with how both Poke and Devin can improve, with Poke turning to Cognition’s latest software engineering model. ZWE-1.7 for some tasks. A complete combination of the two products is also not excluded.

“I think in the long run Poke can be more reliable in orchestrating all this coding [tasks]…and at the same time, Devin could become more like Poke,” said Von Hagen. “Like now, Devin can only do one PR – pull request – at a time… I think there is a lot of value in having Poke orchestrate different Devin sessions.” Additionally, Poke can help Devin remember tasks from different sessions.

“It would be good to have a persistent colleague,” he added.