The Interaction Company of California has been acquired by AI coding startup Cognition in a deal valuing the startup in the low nine figures. The purchase brings Poke, an AI assistant users text like a friend, into Cognition’s fold.
The transaction moves Poke’s interaction model and personality to Cognition’s coding assistant, Devin. In return, Poke will use Cognition’s models and infrastructure to become faster and more reliable.
The personality play
What makes Poke interesting to consumers is how it engages with requests. Instead of functioning like a tool, it chats familiarly, responding like a friend and incorporating slang and humor.
That approach could add value to Devin’s coding agent. Marvin von Hagen, co-founder of the Interaction Company, explained this dynamic in an interview with TechCrunch.
“You probably prefer it if you have co-workers that have personality, rather than if you have co-workers that are just robots,” he said. “When you have co-workers that are also software engineers, they can also make a joke. And you’ll find it funny and enjoyable.”
The acquisition underscores a growing belief that how AI assistants interact with users will become just as valuable as the underlying models powering them. Cognition wants to make Devin feel less like software and more like a colleague.
“The Interaction team has built an agent that people love: it’s proactive, it knows you, and it’s fun to talk to. That’s exactly how working with Devin should feel, and now we get to build it together,” Cognition co-founder Scott Wu wrote in a blog post.
Wu also noted he and Cognition co-founder Walden Yan had been angel investors in the company behind Poke.
How it works
First launched in March 2026, Poke allows users to engage with its AI agent through their messaging platform of choice, whether that is iMessage, SMS, Telegram, or, in some markets, WhatsApp.
People use Poke for a variety of tasks, across categories like travel, health, finance, scheduling, and education. Von Hagen noted that productivity tasks like managing emails, reminders, and to-dos were among Poke’s most common use cases.
Over the past three months, Poke users exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform, Cognition said. But despite being used by hundreds of thousands of people, Poke had been expensive to run, making it difficult to turn a profit, von Hagen said.
In June, Poke became the first AI agent to be approved to run on Apple’s Messages for Business platform, which provides businesses with a standardized experience for handling their customer communications within Apple’s Messages app.
What it means
Going forward, nothing will immediately change for Poke through the end of the year. Poke plans to remain on Apple’s platform.
However, next year the team will experiment with how both Poke and Devin can improve. Poke will turn to Cognition’s newest software engineering model, SWE-1.7, for some tasks.
Fully combining the two products has not been ruled out. Von Hagen said he thinks in the long term Poke can be more reliable with orchestrating all these coding tasks.
At the same time, Devin could become more like Poke. Right now, Devin can only do one pull request at a time. There is value in having Poke orchestrate different Devin sessions. Plus, Poke could help Devin remember tasks across different sessions.
“It would be good to have a persistent co-worker,” he added.
