Cognition has acquired The Interaction Company of California, the startup behind the conversational AI assistant Poke, in a deal valued in the low nine figures, TechCrunch reports. The acquisition is meant to bring Poke’s interaction style and personality into Cognition’s coding agent Devin.
Poke is designed to be contacted like a friend through messaging services such as iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and in some markets WhatsApp. Users ask it for help with travel, scheduling, health, finance, education, and reminders. Cognition says Poke users exchanged more than 100 million messages over the past three months, but Poke had been expensive to run on its own.
For Cognition, the deal reflects a belief that the feel of an AI assistant is becoming a product advantage, not just a layer of polish. Devin already acts as a software engineering agent, but Cognition wants it to feel less like a tool and more like a teammate. Poke will remain unchanged through the end of the year, while the teams explore whether Poke can orchestrate coding tasks and help Devin remember work across sessions.