The Interaction Company of California

AI Agents · Consumer AI · Developer Tools

Acquisition

Cognition acquires Poke maker in low nine-figure deal

The coding agent Devin is borrowing a chatty consumer assistant's personality to feel less like software and more like a colleague.

• Cognition, the AI coding startup behind Devin, announced on July 23, 2026 that it acquired The Interaction Company of California, maker of the texting-native AI assistant Poke, in a deal valued in the low nine figures.
• Poke is a personal AI agent that messages users first over iMessage, SMS, Telegram and, in some markets, WhatsApp, exchanging more than 100 million messages in its first three months since launching in March 2026.
• The deal folds Poke's conversational, humor-laced interaction style into Devin, while Poke gains access to Cognition's models and infrastructure to run faster and more reliably.
• Cognition co-founders Scott Wu and Walden Yan were angel investors in the Interaction Company before this acquisition, suggesting the deal path was seeded years in advance.
• In June 2026, Poke became the first AI agent approved to run on Apple's Messages for Business platform, a channel Apple normally reserves for company-to-customer texting.
• Cognition later said Poke had become costly to operate, a factor that reportedly helped push the deal forward despite the assistant's fast user growth.
• The teams plan to test Poke on Cognition's newer SWE-1.7 coding model next year, and say a deeper merger of the two products remains possible.
• The acquisition signals that AI products may increasingly compete on tone and interaction style, not just model capability, as assistants move from tools to colleague-like presences.