Could Poke be the accessible version of OpenClaw for everyday users? That's the vision driving a new startup, which provides an AI agent available through iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and, in certain regions, WhatsApp. This personal assistant, named Poke, became publicly available in March, enabling people to use a familiar messaging interface to delegate tasks. Currently, Poke assists with a range of daily activities via text, such as organizing your day, managing calendars, monitoring health and fitness, controlling smart home devices, editing photos, and more.

While you might still use a general AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude for inquiries or research, Poke is designed for when you need to accomplish something swiftly or automate a routine task to save time. For example, you could instruct Poke to notify you about specific emails—perhaps those from family or your manager—or to give you a morning reminder to carry an umbrella. It can assist in tracking health and fitness objectives, provide sports scores from the previous night, send daily medication alerts, or summarize the day's news. Users can even create their own automations using plain text and share them with others. Supported by Spark Capital, General Catalyst, and various angel investors, this ten-person company recently secured an additional $10 million, supplementing a $15 million seed round from last year. Its current post-money valuation stands at $300 million.

The launch of this tool coincides with a surge in demand for agentic AI systems, prompting OpenAI to acquire OpenClaw's creator and leading Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to emphasize that every company needs an OpenClaw strategy when introducing Nvidia's enterprise alternative. However, for those less technically skilled, the idea of installing software via terminal, handling dependencies, and debugging errors can be intimidating. Additionally, systems like OpenClaw present security worries due to their deep system access. Consequently, OpenClaw and similar agentic platforms often feel inaccessible to many. The Poke team aims to bridge this gap. "We observed that people wanted to use Poke for everything... Even though it was initially just for email, users began asking Poke to remind them to take medication. They inquired about sports results—'Hey Poke, tell me every morning if I need a jacket,'" explains von Hagen. "At that time, we lacked much of this functionality, but we realized we needed to become a general-purpose tool much faster because people genuinely appreciated its personality and human-like quality."

The team subsequently shifted focus partially, striving to make Poke more practical, proactive, and relatable. Unlike OpenClaw, starting with Poke is straightforward: you visit Poke.com, click "Get Started," and enter your phone number. There's no app to download, as the assistant works entirely through text messaging.

Behind the scenes, Poke selects the AI model most suitable for each task, whether from a major AI provider or an open-source option. "This is one of our key long-term advantages: nearly all our competitors are large tech firms or labs tied to specific providers. For instance, Meta AI will only ever use Meta models, and ChatGPT will only ever use OpenAI models," von Hagen notes. To function on messaging platforms like iMessage, Poke also utilizes Linq, a solution that integrates AI assistants within messaging apps. The service operates via SMS and Telegram as well, but WhatsApp support is currently restricted after Meta blocked other general-purpose chatbots last autumn. This situation may evolve, however. Regulators from the EU, Italy, and Brazil have initiated antitrust investigations to challenge this decision, which has already allowed Poke to return to Brazil. It is hoped that this will also enable Poke to work on WhatsApp in the EU once Meta reduces associated costs. (Meta has faced criticism over high fees—von Hagen describes it as a form of "malicious compliance" that he expects will soon be resolved.)

At launch, Poke provides a variety of "recipes"—pre-configured tools that help automate different areas of your personal or professional life. These span categories including health and wellness, productivity, finance, scheduling, travel, home, school, email, community, and, for technical users, developer tools. Installing them requires just a button click followed by a standard authorization process if necessary. These recipes are designed to integrate with familiar apps and services like Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, Notion, Linear, Granola, and others. There are health and fitness recipes compatible with Strava, Withings, Oura, Fitbit, and more, as well as those for smart home devices from companies such as Philips Hue and Sonos. Developers using Poke can also automate parts of their workflow through integrations with tools like PostHog, Webflow, Supabase, Vercel, Devin, Sentry, GitHub, Cursor Cloud Agents, and others. Poke employs a multi-layered security model involving regular penetration testing, security checks, various tools, and restricted permissions for both AI agents and human staff. By default, the team cannot view any content within user tokens unless a user manually opts to share access to a log file or analytics by adjusting a setting.

In recent weeks, Poke's users have created thousands of additional recipes and automations, which the company intends to add to its recipes directory for discovery soon. It is also incentivizing creators to build these shareable recipes by offering payments ranging from 10 cents to a dollar per user who signs up for Poke via a recipe, with the amount varying by geography.

The cost of using Poke is notably affordable: it's free to begin, with flexible pricing thereafter. During beta testing, users actually negotiated monthly prices with the AI agent, typically between $10 and $30—or so Poke stated in response to this query. Von Hagen explains that pricing now depends on how the AI agent is utilized. If your requests don't require real-time data, you can likely use Poke for free. Costs for Poke arise from real-time inference, such as automations triggered by every incoming email or real-time flight check-ins. To set prices, the company provided Poke with guidelines on expense levels, enabling it to determine personalized pricing. Although the company has improved Poke's efficiency to reduce costs, von Hagen notes that profitability is not the current primary goal.

"We genuinely don't aim to make money; we are focused on growth. We want to build a product for a billion people, and monetization is truly secondary," he says. "The objective for the coming weeks and months is to integrate Poke into everyday life." To achieve this, the company will collaborate with creators and influencers to demonstrate how they use Poke.

Co-founded by Felix Schlegel, the company is not disclosing exact customer sign-up numbers, only mentioning that the figure has grown tenfold over the past few months. (However, Poke was observed at the top of Vercel's AI Gateway leaderboard, for whatever that indicates.)

Beyond its main institutional investors, Spark Capital and General Catalyst, the startup has drawn interest from numerous angel investors. These include John and Patrick Collison (founders of Stripe), Jake and Logan Paul, Logan Kirlpatrick from DeepMind, Joanne Jang of OpenAI, and Scott Wu and Walden Yan (founders of Cognition). The list also features Vercel co-founder Guillermo Rauch, PayPal co-founder Ken Howery, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, Mercor co-founder Brendan Foody, Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf, Flapping Airplanes co-founder Ben Spector, and several others.