Poke, the AI ​​assistant you text like a friend, is taking its next big step. The company behind the assistant, The Interaction Company of California, has been acquired by AI coding startup Cognition in a deal that values ​​the startup in the “low nine figures.”

The deal will bring Poke’s interaction model and personality to Cognition’s coding assistant, Devin. Poke, meanwhile, will leverage Cognition’s models and infrastructure to become faster and more reliable, Cognition said.

What makes Poke interesting to consumers (and now, its acquirer) is how it interacts with user requests. Instead of functioning as a tool, Poke chats more familiarly with users, responds like a friend, and even incorporates slang and humor into its interactions. That’s something that could add value to Devin’s encoder agent.

“You’d probably prefer to have coworkers who have personality, rather than having coworkers who are just robots,” Interaction Company co-founder Marvin von Hagen explained in an interview with TechCrunch, where he also confirmed the price of the deal. “When you have coworkers who are also software engineers, they can make a joke too. And you’ll find it fun and funny.”

The acquisition underscores a growing belief that the way AI assistants interact with users will be as valuable as the underlying models that power them. Cognition wants Devin to feel less like software and more like a colleague.

“The Interaction team has built an agent that people love: He’s proactive, he knows you, and he’s fun to talk to. This is exactly how working with Devin should feel, and now we can build it together,” Cognition co-founder Scott Wu wrote in a blog post.

He also noted that he and Cognition co-founder Walden Yan had been angel investors in the company behind Poke.

First launched in March 2026, Poke allows users to interact with their AI agent through the messaging platform of their choice, whether it be iMessage, SMS, Telegram or, in some markets, WhatsApp. People use Poke for a variety of tasks, in categories such as travel, health, finance, programming, and education.

Von Hagen noted that productivity tasks such as managing emails, reminders, and to-dos were among the most common use cases for Poke.

Over the past three months, Poke users have exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform, Cognition said. But despite being used by hundreds of thousands of people, Poke was expensive to maintain, making it difficult to turn a profit, von Hagen said.

In June, Poke became the first AI agent approved to run on Apple’s Messages for Business platform, giving businesses a standardized experience for handling their customer communications within Apple’s Messages app.

Going forward, nothing will immediately change for Poke until the end of the year, we’re told. Poke plans to remain on the Apple platform.

However, next year the team will experiment with how they can improve both Poke and Devin, with Poke turning to Cognition’s newest software engineering model, SWE-1.7, for some tasks. The total combination of both products is not ruled out either.

“I think in the long run Poke can be more reliable if it orchestrates all of these coding tasks. [tasks]”…and at the same time, Devin might be more like Poke,” von Hagen said. “Like now, Devin can only do one PR (pull request) at a time… I think it’s very valuable to have Poke orchestrate different Devin sessions.” Additionally, Poke could help Devin remember tasks in different sessions.

“It would be nice to have a persistent coworker,” he added.