The AI assistant Poke, known for its friendly, text-based interactions, is taking a significant step forward. The company behind it, The Interaction Company of California, has been acquired by Cognition, an AI coding startup, in a deal that values the startup in the “low nine figures.”

This acquisition will integrate Poke’s conversational style and personality into Cognition’s coding assistant, Devin. In return, Poke will leverage Cognition’s advanced models and infrastructure to become faster and more dependable, according to Cognition. What makes Poke appealing to users—and now to its new owner—is its unique way of handling requests. Rather than acting as a mere tool, Poke chats in a more natural, familiar manner, responding like a friend and incorporating slang, humor, and casual language into its replies. This quality could enhance Devin’s coding agent. “When you have co-workers that are also software engineers, they can also make a joke. And you’ll find it funny and enjoyable,” the company noted.

The deal highlights a growing belief that the way AI assistants interact with people will become just as important as the underlying technology powering them. Cognition aims to make Devin feel less like software and more like a teammate. “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,” Cognition co-founder Scott Wu wrote in a blog post. He also mentioned that he and fellow co-founder Walden Yan had previously been angel investors in the company behind Poke.

First launched in March 2026, Poke allows users to interact with its AI agent through various messaging platforms, including iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and, in select markets, WhatsApp. People use Poke for a wide range of tasks spanning travel, health, finance, scheduling, and education. According to von Hagen, productivity tasks like managing emails, reminders, and to-do lists are among its most common uses.

Over the past three months, Poke users have exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform, Cognition reported. However, despite serving hundreds of thousands of people, running Poke has been costly, making it difficult to achieve profitability, von Hagen explained. In June, Poke became the first AI agent approved to operate on Apple’s Messages for Business platform, which offers businesses a standardized way to manage customer communications within Apple’s Messages app.

For now, nothing will change for Poke through the end of the year, according to the company. Poke plans to remain on Apple’s platform. But starting next year, the team will explore ways to improve both Poke and Devin, with Poke adopting Cognition’s newest software engineering model, SWE-1.7, for certain tasks. A full merger of the two products hasn’t been ruled out either. “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,” von Hagen said. “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.” Additionally, Poke could help Devin remember tasks across different sessions. “It would be good to have a persistent co-worker,” he added.