Cognition, Maker of Devin, Acquires Text-Based AI Agent Poke

Cognition, the company known for its coding agent Devin, announced on July 23, 2026 that it is acquiring The Interaction Company of California, the startup behind Poke, an AI agent that operates entirely through text messages. The deal brings together two companies that have watched each other for years and bet on the same vision: AI agents working in the background around the clock, not just inside a chat window.

An Agent That Texts First

Poke is a product of The Interaction Company, a Palo Alto startup founded by Marvin von Hagen and Felix Schlegel. It runs over iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and partially WhatsApp, with no separate app required. Users ask it to plan their day, manage their calendar, track their health, control a smart home, or edit photos, simply by texting it like a friend.

The product stands out from other assistants because it initiates contact on its own and follows up with reminders instead of waiting for a command. The company also offers what it calls "recipes," ready-made automations for health, finance, travel, and coding tasks, along with integrations with more than fifty services, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Notion, Strava, and GitHub.

Why Cognition Is Buying Personality

For Cognition, the deciding factor wasn't the technology itself but how users respond to the way Poke behaves. The Interaction team built an agent that feels like a person rather than software: it's proactive, remembers the context of conversations, and, as its creators point out, is simply pleasant to talk to. That's exactly the direction Cognition wants to take Devin, which today is associated mainly with engineering tasks.

Poke is a personal agent that lives in your text messages. It texts you first, follows up with reminders, and feels less like software and more like a friend. - Scott Wu, CEO of Cognition

Distribution Over Features

The second reason behind the acquisition is a distribution channel Cognition didn't have. Poke is the only third-party AI agent Apple has allowed to run natively inside Apple Messages Business Chat. That means access to an app iPhone users open dozens of times a day, something that can't easily be replicated through features alone. Scott Wu and a Cognition investor known by the pseudonym Walden were, in fact, early investors in The Interaction Company before the full acquisition took place.

Before the acquisition, The Interaction Company had raised $15 million in a seed round, followed by another $10 million at a $300 million valuation, backed by Spark Capital and General Catalyst along with angel investors tied to Stripe and OpenAI. According to Cognition, Poke's user base has grown tenfold over the past few months, though the company did not share exact figures.

What's Next for Poke Users

Cognition says Poke will keep working for existing users with no noticeable changes, while gaining speed and reliability by tapping into Cognition's own models and infrastructure. The company also wants to combine Devin's engineering skills with Poke's everyday popularity, creating a single agent present both in a developer's workflow and in simple daily tasks.

The acquisition fits a broader trend among AI agent companies, which increasingly compete not just on answer quality but on how much an agent feels like a conversation partner rather than a tool. Cognition, valued at $26 billion this year after a $1 billion funding round, has the resources to buy that kind of experience rather than build it from scratch.

For the Polish market, the deal is for now a distant one, since Poke doesn't operate locally or in Polish, but it points to the direction major coding-agent players are heading. If Cognition does bring Poke's tone and proactivity into Devin, competitors such as GitHub Copilot or tools built on Claude Code will have to respond not just with better code but with a more human way of communicating with developers.