Cognition Buys AI Assistant Poke in Deal Valued at Low Nine Figures

Cognition, the AI lab behind autonomous coding agent Devin, announced on July 23 that it has acquired The Interaction Company of California, the startup behind Poke, an AI assistant users text like a friend. The deal values Poke in the low nine figures, according to TechCrunch, which said Interaction Company co-founder Marvin von Hagen confirmed the price directly.

Poke had raised a $15 million seed round in September 2025 at a $100 million valuation, backed by Spark Capital and General Catalyst, according to Crypto Briefing. A later funding round pushed the company's valuation to $300 million. Cognition's own co-founder Scott Wu was already an angel investor in Poke before buying it outright, a fact both TechCrunch and Crypto Briefing confirmed.

What Cognition actually bought

Poke isn't a chatbot in the usual sense. Users text it through iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and in some markets WhatsApp, and it handles tasks across travel, health, finance, scheduling and education. Von Hagen told TechCrunch that managing emails, reminders and to-dos were among the most common uses.

The personality is the product. Poke throws in slang and humor instead of talking like a search bar with legs. Von Hagen put it plainly to TechCrunch: "You probably prefer it if you have co-workers that have personality, rather than if you have co-workers that are just robots." Cognition wants that same familiarity wrapped around Devin, its coding agent, so that working with an AI engineer feels less like running software and more like messaging a teammate.

Cognition co-founder Scott Wu wrote in a company blog post that the Interaction team "built an agent that people love: it's proactive, it knows you, and it's fun to talk to," and said that's exactly how working with Devin should feel.

The traction and the money problem

Poke launched publicly in early 2026 after a March beta and picked up real usage fast. Over the past three months, Poke users exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform, per figures Cognition provided to TechCrunch. In June, Poke became the first standalone AI agent approved to run on Apple's Messages for Business platform, a gatekeeping process Apple runs based on reliability and brand safety, not decentralization or ideology, as Crypto Briefing pointed out.

But popularity didn't mean profitability. Von Hagen told TechCrunch that despite hundreds of thousands of users, Poke was expensive to run and hard to turn into a sustainable business on its own. That's the practical reason a personality-driven consumer app with genuine traction still needed to sell rather than raise another round and grind toward profitability alone. Running large language models at scale for free-flowing conversational use costs real money, and Poke apparently couldn't cover it with what it was charging.

Going forward, nothing changes for existing Poke users through the end of 2026, per TechCrunch. Poke stays on Apple's Messages platform. Starting next year, the teams plan to experiment with integrating Poke's interaction style into Devin while Poke itself moves onto Cognition's SWE-1.7 model and broader infrastructure, according to details in the TechCrunch report and reflected in AI Deep Signal's summary of it.

Why this matters beyond one acquisition

Crypto Briefing framed the deal as evidence that interface design, not raw model capability, is becoming the actual battleground in AI. Every major lab now has access to roughly similar underlying model quality, so how an assistant talks, remembers context, and behaves has become the differentiator companies are willing to pay nine figures for.

There's a reasonable skeptical read here too. A company burning cash on a consumer product with no clear path to profit getting scooped up by a well-funded enterprise player isn't automatically a triumph of product design. It can just as easily be a signal that consumer-AI unit economics are still broken across the board. Hundreds of thousands of users and 100 million messages sounds impressive until you remember von Hagen himself said it was too expensive to sustain.

Cognition, founded in November 2023 by Scott Wu, Steven Hao and Walden Yan, has built its reputation and its capital position on Devin. This is Cognition's latest acquisition in a string of AI-agent consolidation moves industry-wide, and it raises the obvious next question: whether Devin-with-personality actually improves developer productivity, or just makes an expensive tool sound friendlier while the underlying cost problem that sank Poke's standalone business gets absorbed into Cognition's balance sheet instead.