Why Cognition Bought Poke: AI Personality Is Becoming a Competitive Advantage

Poke, the AI assistant designed to chat like a friend, is taking its next major step. The Interaction Company of California, the startup behind Poke, has been acquired by AI coding firm Cognition in a transaction valuing the company in the low nine figures.

Under this agreement, Poke’s interaction model and distinct personality will be integrated into Cognition’s coding assistant, Devin. In return, Poke will leverage Cognition’s advanced models and infrastructure to enhance its speed and reliability, according to the company.

What makes Poke appealing to users—and now to its acquirer—is its unique approach to handling requests. Rather than operating as a standard tool, Poke converses with users in a familiar manner, responding like a friend and even weaving in slang and humor. This trait could add significant value to Devin’s coding capabilities.

“You likely prefer co-workers with personality over those that act like robots,” said Interaction Company co-founder Marvin von Hagen in an interview with TechCrunch, where he also confirmed the deal’s price. “When your co-workers are software engineers, they can crack a joke. You find it funny and enjoyable.”

This acquisition highlights a growing consensus that the way AI assistants interact with users is becoming just as critical as the underlying models driving them. Cognition aims to make Devin feel less like software and more like a true 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.

He also revealed that he and Cognition co-founder Walden Yan had previously served as angel investors in the company behind Poke.

Launched in March 2026, Poke allows users to interact with its AI agent via their preferred messaging platform, including iMessage, SMS, Telegram, or WhatsApp in select markets. Users engage Poke for a wide range of tasks across categories such as travel, health, finance, scheduling, and education.

Von Hagen noted that productivity-focused tasks, such as managing emails, reminders, and to-do lists, are among Poke’s most popular use cases.

Image Credits:Poke/The Interaction Company of California

Over the past three months, Poke users exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform, Cognition reported. However, despite serving hundreds of thousands of users, Poke has been costly to operate, making profitability difficult, according to von Hagen.

In June, Poke became the first AI agent approved to operate on Apple’s Messages for Business platform, which offers businesses a standardized way to handle customer communications within the Apple Messages app.

Looking ahead, there will be no immediate changes for Poke through the end of the year. The service plans to remain on Apple’s platform.

However, next year the team will explore ways to improve both Poke and Devin, with Poke utilizing Cognition’s latest software engineering model, SWE-1.7, for certain tasks. Fully merging the two products remains a possibility.

“I believe that in the long term, Poke can be more reliable at orchestrating these coding tasks… and, conversely, Devin could become more like Poke,” von Hagen said. “Currently, Devin can only handle one pull request at a time. I see significant value in having Poke manage multiple Devin sessions.” Additionally, Poke could help Devin retain memory of tasks across different sessions.

“It would be beneficial to have a persistent co-worker,” he added.