Cognition acquires Poke in 9-figure deal to make AI coding assistant Devin feel like a friend

Cognition, the AI coding startup behind Devin, just acquired The Interaction Company of California — the makers of Poke — in a deal valuing the smaller startup in the “low nine figures.” If you track this space, you know acquisitions that size for a personality layer are rare. It signals something specific: Cognition believes the interface is now as critical as the model underneath.

Poke built a reputation by being the AI you text like a friend. It doesn’t talk like software. It uses slang, cracks jokes, and prods you about your to-do list in iMessage, Telegram, or WhatsApp. That’s a sharp contrast to most assistants that still sound like they’re reading a manual. The company shared that over the past three months, users exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform. Those are genuine engagement numbers, not just downloads.

But here’s the friction. Co-founder Marvin von Hagen admitted Poke was expensive to run — expensive enough that profitability was a problem despite hundreds of thousands of users. Consumer AI is a brutal business with inferencing costs eating revenue alive. Cognition’s infrastructure and its new SWE-1.7 model give Poke a path to being faster and cheaper. In return, Poke’s conversational DNA gets injected into Devin, which co-founder Scott Wu wants to feel “less like software and more like a colleague.” Von Hagen put it bluntly: you’d rather work with a co-worker who has a personality than one who is just a robot.

The near-term plan is hands-off. Poke stays on Apple’s Messages for Business platform through year-end, a notable distinction since it was the first AI agent approved there in June. Next year, the real stitching begins — using Poke to orchestrate multiple Devin sessions so the coding agent can juggle tasks and remember context across projects. “It would be good to have a persistent co-worker,” von Hagen said. That’s the bet: memory plus personality equals something you actually want on your team.