AI programming startup Cognition has acquired The Interaction Company of California, the company behind AI assistant Poke. TechCrunch, citing a co-founder, reported that the deal values Poke in the "low nine-figure dollar" range. Following the transaction, the two companies will work on product integration, focusing on bringing Poke's interactive features to the AI programming assistant Devin.
Poke focuses on message-based companionship interaction.
Poke's unique feature lies not in its underlying model, but in how it interacts with users. It functions more like a messaging assistant than a traditional utility product. Users can interact with it via iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and WhatsApp in select markets.
Poke incorporates more colloquial language, humor, and a stronger sense of context in his replies, which is something Cognition values. For the acquiring company, this kind of experience could transform Devin from just command-executing software into a more sustainable, long-term collaborative partner.
Devin will adopt this interactive style.
Cognition stated that Poke's interactive model and product style will be used to improve Devin. Co-founder Scott Wu wrote in a blog post that the Poke team's product is proactive, understands users, and is more likely to be used consistently—exactly the experience Devin aims to deliver in the future.
Poke co-founder Marvin von Hagen believes that users generally prefer working with collaborators who have "personalities," and this experience also applies to software engineering assistants. For AI companies, the competition is shifting from simply comparing model capabilities to simultaneously competing on interactive experience and user stickiness.
Deeper integration will be tested next year.
Both parties stated that Poke will not undergo significant changes before the end of this year and will continue to operate on Apple's Messages for Business platform. Poke became the first AI agent approved for integration into the platform in June of this year; this platform is primarily used by businesses to handle customer communications within the Apple Messages app.
Starting next year, the team will test deeper collaboration between the two products. Poke plans to integrate Cognition's latest software engineering model, SWE-1.7, into some tasks to improve execution efficiency and stability, and further merging of product forms in the future is not ruled out.
More than 100 million messages in three months
According to Cognition, Poke users have sent over 100 million messages on the platform in the past three months, with a user base of hundreds of thousands. Use cases cover categories such as travel, health, finance, calendars, and education, with email management, reminders, and to-do lists being the most common.
The co-founder of Poke stated that product operating costs have consistently been high, and high usage has not directly translated into easy profitability. After merging with Cognition, Poke hopes to leverage the latter's models and infrastructure to improve speed, reliability, and cost structure, while also helping Devin retain task memories across different programming sessions and coordinate multiple development tasks to proceed in parallel.
