AI coding startup Cognition has acquired The Interaction Company of California, the team behind Poke, the AI assistant you text like a friend. According to TechCrunch AI, the deal values the startup in the “low nine figures” and folds Poke’s conversational personality into Devin, Cognition’s coding agent. Poke, in turn, gets access to Cognition’s models and infrastructure to run faster and more reliably.
This is a bet on something most AI companies have treated as an afterthought: how an assistant talks to you, not just what it can do.
What happened
Poke launched in March 2026 and stood out by refusing to act like a tool. Instead of terse, robotic replies, it chats like a friend, cracks jokes, and uses slang. Users reach it through whatever messaging app they already live in, including iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and WhatsApp in some markets.
The numbers explain the interest. TechCrunch AI reports that Poke users exchanged more than 100 million messages over the past three months, with hundreds of thousands of people on the platform. Common jobs included managing emails, reminders, and to-dos, plus travel, health, finance, and scheduling.
Cognition’s pitch is simple: make Devin feel less like software and more like a colleague. “You probably prefer it if you have co-workers that have personality, rather than if you have co-workers that are just robots,” Interaction Company co-founder Marvin von Hagen told TechCrunch AI. Cognition co-founder Scott Wu, who was an angel investor in the company along with co-founder Walden Yan, wrote that Poke is “proactive, it knows you, and it’s fun to talk to.”
Why this matters
What stands out here is the underlying thesis. For the past two years, the industry has competed almost entirely on model capability: bigger context windows, higher benchmark scores, better reasoning. This deal argues that interaction design, the personality and feel of an agent, is becoming just as valuable as the model underneath.
That’s a meaningful shift. Coding agents like Devin have been sold on raw output, how many pull requests they can close. Cognition is now saying the experience of working alongside the agent is a competitive edge in itself. If a developer wants to spend eight hours a day with an AI teammate, whether that teammate is pleasant to talk to starts to matter.
There’s also a hard business reality underneath the vision. Von Hagen said Poke was expensive to run and hard to make profitable, despite its popularity. Getting acquired by a well-funded coding company solves the infrastructure bill while keeping the product alive.
What comes next
Nothing changes immediately. TechCrunch AI reports Poke stays as is through the end of the year and plans to remain on Apple’s Messages for Business platform, where in June it became the first AI agent approved to run.
The experiments start in 2026:
- Poke borrows Cognition’s engine. It will use Cognition’s newest software engineering model, SWE-1.7, for some tasks to boost reliability.
- Devin borrows Poke’s personality. The coding agent should feel more like a colleague that remembers you across sessions.
- Poke as an orchestrator. Von Hagen floated using Poke to coordinate multiple Devin sessions at once. Right now Devin handles one pull request at a time, and he sees value in Poke managing several in parallel.
- A full merge is on the table. Combining the two products has not been ruled out.
The persistence angle is worth watching. Von Hagen wants Poke to help Devin remember tasks across sessions, calling it a “persistent co-worker.” Memory and continuity have been weak spots for coding agents, so an assistant layer that holds context across jobs could be more than a personality upgrade.
For practitioners, the takeaway is straightforward. Expect coding tools to start competing on feel, not just function, and expect more consumer-friendly interaction layers wrapped around serious engineering agents. If personality really is the next battleground, this won’t be the last acquisition of its kind.
More details are available in the original TechCrunch AI report.