Cognition Acquires Poke to Bring More Personality to AI Coding Assistant Devin

AI coding startup Cognition has acquired Poke, the conversational AI assistant developed by The Interaction Company of California, in a deal valued in the low nine figures. The acquisition brings together Poke’s human-like interaction model with Cognition’s AI coding assistant, Devin, as the companies seek to make AI agents feel more like collaborative co-workers than software tools.

Under the agreement, Poke’s conversational personality and interaction design will be integrated into Devin. At the same time, Poke will gain access to Cognition’s AI models and infrastructure to improve its speed, reliability and overall performance.

Poke has differentiated itself by allowing users to communicate with its AI through everyday messaging platforms as if they were texting a friend. Instead of responding like a traditional chatbot, the assistant uses casual language, humour and slang to create more natural conversations. Cognition believes those qualities can make interactions with Devin feel more engaging for developers.

AI personality becoming a competitive advantage.ge

Interaction Company co-founder Marvin von Hagen said users generally prefer working alongside colleagues with personality rather than software that feels robotic. He argued that software engineering teams naturally include humour and casual interactions, and AI assistants should be able to provide a similar experience.

The acquisition reflects a broader trend across the AI industry, where companies are increasingly viewing conversational style and user experience as competitive advantages alongside model performance. Cognition co-founder Scott Wu said Poke had built an AI agent that users enjoy because it is proactive, understands individual users and is enjoyable to talk to, qualities the company wants to bring to Devin.

Wu also noted that both he and Cognition co-founder Walden Yan had previously invested in The Interaction Company as angel investors before the acquisition. Poke’s rapid growth and practical use cases

Launched in March 2026, Poke enables users to interact with its AI assistant through iMessage, SMS, Telegram and, in selected markets, WhatsApp. The assistant is used for a broad range of everyday tasks, including travel planning, healthcare questions, personal finance, scheduling and education.

According to von Hagen, productivity features such as managing emails, reminders and to-do lists have become some of Poke’s most popular use cases. Over the past three months, users exchanged more than 100 million messages through the platform, demonstrating growing consumer adoption.

Despite reaching hundreds of thousands of users, Poke remained expensive to operate, making profitability difficult to achieve as the company continued investing in its AI infrastructure.

Future integration with Devin

In June, Poke became the first AI agent approved to operate on Apple’s Messages for Business platform, allowing businesses to communicate with customers through Apple’s Messages application using a standardised interface.

The companies said nothing will immediately change for Poke users through the end of the year, and the service will continue operating on Apple’s platform. Beginning next year, however, the teams plan to explore deeper integration between Poke and Devin, including using Cognition’s latest software engineering model, SWE-1.7, for selected tasks.

The possibility of eventually combining the two products also remains open. Von Hagen said Poke could eventually orchestrate multiple Devin coding sessions while helping the coding assistant retain context across projects. He suggested that creating a persistent AI co-worker capable of remembering previous tasks and coordinating software development workflows could provide significant value for developers.