Cognition, the artificial intelligence company behind the coding assistant Devin, has completed the acquisition of Poke and its parent organization The Interaction Company of California. The transaction, valued in the low nine figures according to company executives, represents a significant strategic move in the evolving AI assistant landscape.

Poke has carved out a unique position in the AI market through its distinctive conversational approach. Rather than operating as a traditional productivity tool, Poke engages users through natural, friend-like interactions that incorporate humor, colloquial language, and personalized responses. The platform operates across multiple messaging channels including iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and WhatsApp, making AI assistance accessible through users' preferred communication methods.

The acquisition comes at a time when Poke has demonstrated substantial user engagement, processing more than 100 million messages over the past three months. The platform serves hundreds of thousands of users across diverse use cases including travel planning, health management, financial tasks, scheduling coordination, and educational support. Productivity-focused activities such as email management, reminders, and task organization represent some of the most common applications.

Marvin von Hagen, co-founder of The Interaction Company, explained the strategic rationale behind the deal, emphasizing that workplace collaboration benefits from personality-driven interactions. The integration aims to make Devin feel less like software and more like a collaborative team member who can engage in both technical problem-solving and casual conversation.

Despite its user popularity, Poke faced significant operational challenges, particularly around cost management and profitability. The platform's resource-intensive nature made sustainable operations difficult, creating an opportunity for strategic partnership with Cognition's established infrastructure and model capabilities.

Poke achieved a notable industry milestone earlier this year by becoming the first AI agent approved for Apple's Messages for Business platform. This approval provides businesses with standardized customer communication capabilities within Apple's messaging ecosystem, demonstrating the platform's technical credibility and market potential.

The integration timeline extends through the remainder of the current year, with both platforms maintaining separate operations during the transition period. Beginning next year, the companies plan to experiment with cross-platform improvements, including Poke's adoption of Cognition's SWE-1.7 software engineering model for enhanced task execution.

Future development possibilities include Poke orchestrating multiple simultaneous Devin sessions and providing persistent memory capabilities across different coding projects. This could address current limitations where Devin handles single pull requests sequentially, potentially enabling more complex, multi-threaded development workflows.

The acquisition reflects broader industry recognition that user experience and interaction quality are becoming competitive differentiators in AI assistant development. As these tools become more integrated into professional workflows, companies are discovering that technical capability alone is insufficient for market success.

This trend toward humanized AI interactions suggests a fundamental shift in how artificial intelligence products are designed and marketed. The emphasis on personality, conversational ability, and user engagement indicates that future AI development will need to balance computational sophistication with human-centered design principles.

For the broader AI coding assistant market, this acquisition may establish new expectations around user interaction quality and collaborative capabilities. As development teams increasingly rely on AI assistance, the integration of conversational intelligence with technical functionality could become a standard requirement rather than a differentiating feature.

Related Links:

• AI assistant you text like a friend
• The Interaction Company of California
• Cognition blog post
• Poke task examples
• Apple Messages for Business approval
• SWE-1.7 model details