Cognition acquires Poke in a deal valued in the ‘low nine figures,’ picking up the text-based AI assistant and its unusually warm interaction style to inject some personality into Devin, its autonomous coding agent. It is a bet that how an AI behaves with people is becoming as commercially valuable as what it can actually do.
What Cognition Acquires With Poke
Poke, built by The Interaction Company of California, launched in March 2026 as an AI assistant users could message through Apple‘s iMessage, SMS, Telegram, or WhatsApp in supported markets. It handles travel, health, finance, scheduling, and education queries, though its most common uses are productivity staples: managing emails, reminders, and to-do lists.
Over the past three months, Poke users sent more than 100 million messages on the platform. That engagement comes from hundreds of thousands of people, but von Hagen acknowledged the product had been expensive to operate, making profitability elusive.
In June, Poke became the first AI agent approved to run on Apple’s Messages for Business platform, which gives businesses a standardised channel for customer communications inside Apple Messages. That foothold presumably sweetened the deal for Cognition.
Interaction Company co-founder Marvin von Hagen confirmed the acquisition price to TechCrunch. He framed the rationale in refreshingly human terms: ‘You probably prefer it if you have co-workers that have personality, rather than if you have co-workers that are just robots. When you have co-workers that are also software engineers, they can also make a joke. And you’ll find it funny and enjoyable.’
Devin Gets a Personality Transplant
Cognition co-founder Scott Wu set out the vision in a blog post: ‘The Interaction team has built an agent that people love: it’s proactive, it knows you, and it’s fun to talk to. That’s exactly how working with Devin should feel, and now we get to build it together.’ Wu also disclosed that he and fellow co-founder Walden Yan had been angel investors in The Interaction Company before the acquisition.
For Poke users, nothing changes through the end of this year. Come 2025, the team plans to experiment: Poke will draw on Cognition’s SWE-1.7 software engineering model for certain tasks, and the two products could eventually be more tightly combined. Von Hagen sketched one scenario: ‘I think in the long term Poke can be more reliable with orchestrating all these coding [tasks]…and, at the same time, Devin could become more like Poke. Like right now, Devin can only do one PR, pull request, at a time…I think there’s a lot of value in having Poke orchestrate different Devin sessions.’ Persistent memory across sessions is part of the appeal: ‘It would be good to have a persistent co-worker,’ he added.
The acquisition fits a pattern of rapid expansion at Cognition. According to the Cognition blog, the company signed a definitive agreement in July 2025 to acquire Windsurf, an agentic integrated development environment, adding its product, IP, brand, and team. Cognition also struck enterprise deployment partnerships with Cognizant (announced 28 January 2026) and Infosys (announced 7 January 2026) to roll Devin out across their engineering operations and client bases, and opened a London office on 28 January 2026 to anchor its European push.
Contrary Research notes that by mid-2025, Cognition had already shifted from offering a single autonomous engineer to providing an enterprise-ready agentic development environment with secure workspaces, deployable via SaaS or within a customer’s own cloud infrastructure. Poke’s interaction layer slots neatly into that broader platform story.
The underlying thesis is straightforward: enterprise clients signing large Devin contracts are more likely to keep renewing if their developers actually enjoy working with the tool. Making an AI coding agent feel like a witty colleague rather than a ticket-closing machine is, apparently, now a line item on the acquisition spreadsheet.
Watch for what the combined product looks like when Cognition’s 2026 roadmap crystallises. If Poke really can orchestrate multiple Devin sessions while maintaining memory across them, the gap between ‘AI assistant’ and ‘AI team member’ gets meaningfully narrower.
