Cognition Acquires AI Chatbot Maker Poke in Low Nine-Figure Deal to Enhance Autonomous Coding Agent Devin
AI coding startup Cognition has acquired The Interaction Company of California, the developer behind conversational AI assistant Poke, in a transaction valued in the low nine figures. The acquisition is designed to integrate Poke’s natural language interaction model and session orchestration into Devin, Cognition’s autonomous software engineering agent.
The move reflects a growing industry focus on human-AI interface design. While automated coding platforms have advanced rapidly in raw code generation, enabling software agents to communicate fluidly and retain long-term context across complex workflows remains a crucial challenge for developer adoption.
Cognition co-founders Scott Wu and Walden Yan were early angel investors in The Interaction Company prior to the buyout. Confirming the purchase price range, Interaction Company co-founder Marvin von Hagen stated that joining Cognition will provide Poke with access to high-performance computing infrastructure and specialized software models.
First launched in March 2026, Poke gained traction by allowing users to text an AI assistant directly through standard messaging protocols, including iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and WhatsApp. Rather than functioning as a traditional utility tool, the assistant communicates using casual language, humor, and slang while managing daily tasks across personal scheduling, finance, travel, and administrative workflows.
Over the past three months, Poke processed more than 100 million messages for hundreds of thousands of active users. In June 2026, the service became the first AI agent approved to operate on Apple’s Messages for Business platform, enabling official enterprise integration within the native iOS messaging app.
Despite strong user engagement, consumer-focused language model assistants face significant operational overhead. High token consumption and infrastructure costs associated with real-time conversational processing over messaging networks have made independent profitability challenging for standalone consumer AI tools.
Poke will continue operating without immediate changes to its service through the end of the year, maintaining its availability on Apple’s messaging platform. Beginning in 2027, the development teams plan to experiment with technical integrations, including leveraging Cognition’s specialized SWE-1.7 software engineering model to improve Poke’s operational speed and accuracy.
In the long term, the combined engineering teams aim to expand how autonomous software agents handle multi-step development projects. Current AI coding tools typically execute single tasks in isolation, such as managing a single pull request at a time. Incorporating Poke’s persistent context memory and multi-tasking framework will allow Devin to coordinate multiple concurrent coding pipelines while maintaining continuous, context-aware interaction with human engineers.
