Why Cognition Bought Poke: AI Personality Becomes a Competitive Advantage

The California-based startup The Interaction Company, creator of the AI assistant Poke designed to be a conversational companion, has been acquired by Cognition, the company behind the AI coding agent Devin. The deal is valued in the "low nine figures" (hundreds of millions of dollars). Poke is known for its casual tone, use of slang and humor, which sets it apart from typical tools. According to The Interaction Company co-founder Marvin von Hagen, people prefer colleagues with personality over "robots." Cognition plans to apply Poke's interaction model to Devin, so it is perceived not as software but as a permanent colleague. Cognition co-founder Scott Wu noted that the Poke team created an agent that users love: it is proactive, knows the user, and is pleasant to interact with. Launched in March 2026, Poke communicates via iMessage, SMS, Telegram, or WhatsApp and handles tasks related to travel, health, finance, planning, and education. In the past three months, users have sent over 100 million messages. Despite having hundreds of thousands of users, the project was unprofitable due to high operating costs. In June, Poke became the first AI agent approved for use on the Apple Messages for Business platform. Poke will continue operating as usual until the end of the year, and integration will begin next year: Poke will leverage Cognition's latest SWE-1.7 model for certain tasks, with a potential full merger of products. In the future, Poke may coordinate multiple Devin sessions, while Devin could remember tasks across sessions, making it a "permanent colleague." (Note: The text has been translated into natural English, with Latin abbreviations expanded on first mention. Company, product, and model names are kept in their original form. The JSON output is strictly as requested.)