Cognition buys Poke for AI personality
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Cognition acquired The Interaction Company of California (maker of Poke) at a "low nine figures" valuation, with Poke's conversational model moving into Devin while Poke gains Cognition's models and infrastructure.
- Poke, launched in March 2026, became the first AI agent approved on Apple's Messages for Business platform in June and surpassed 100 million messages exchanged over the past three months.
- Poke had been expensive to run despite hundreds of thousands of users, making profitability difficult — the operational gap that Cognition's infrastructure and SWE-1.7 model are positioned to close.
- Cognition co-founder Scott Wu called the Interaction Company's agent "proactive, knows you, and fun to talk to," framing the deal as making Devin feel "less like software and more like a colleague," and noted he and Walden Yan had been angel investors in Poke.
- Poke co-founder Marvin von Hagen said the team will experiment with Cognition's SWE-1.7 next year, envisioning Poke orchestrating multiple Devin sessions and giving Devin persistent task memory across sessions.
Why it matters: Poke's 100 million messages and hundreds of thousands of users couldn't offset expensive operations — Cognition's infrastructure and SWE-1.7 directly solve the unit-economics problem that stalled Poke, while paying a low-nine-figure price for a "personality" layer that pure coding agents like Devin currently lack. The deal reframes conversational design as a moat worth nine figures, not a UX nice-to-have.
