Cognition Acquires Poke: AI Personality Becomes a Competitive Edge
AI coding startup Cognition has acquired conversational AI assistant Poke for a low nine-figure sum, aiming to integrate its friendly interaction model into the Devin coding tool.
Cognition, the company behind the AI coding assistant Devin, has acquired Poke, an AI assistant that users interact with as a friend. The deal is valued in the low nine figures. The acquisition highlights a growing belief that how AI assistants interact with users is becoming as important as the underlying models.
Poke, developed by The Interaction Company of California, stands out for its informal communication style—using slang, humor, and responding like a human. Cognition believes this personality will make Devin feel more like a colleague than a tool. “You probably prefer it if you have co-workers that have personality, rather than if you have co-workers that are just robots,” said co-founder Marvin von Hagen.
Launched in March 2026, Poke allows users to interact via iMessage, SMS, Telegram, or WhatsApp. It is used for travel, health, finance, scheduling, and education. Over the past three months, users exchanged more than 100 million messages. However, Poke was expensive to run and not profitable, von Hagen noted.
Cognition co-founder Scott Wu mentioned that he and co-founder Walden Yan were angel investors in Poke. In June, Poke became the first AI agent approved for Apple’s Messages for Business platform.
Immediately, Poke will remain unchanged through the end of the year and stay on Apple’s platform. Next year, the team will experiment with improvements, including using Cognition’s latest engineering model SWE-1.7. A full merger of the two products is possible. “In the long term, Poke can be more reliable orchestrating coding tasks, and Devin could become more like Poke,” von Hagen said.
