AI Personality Pays Off: Cognition Acquires Poke for Nine-Figure Sum, Signaling New Value in Chatty Assistants

The Interaction Company of California, creator of the AI assistant Poke, has been bought by AI coding startup Cognition in a transaction with a price tag in the low nine figures. The deal will fuse Poke's conversational personality into Devin, Cognition's coding agent, making the tool feel more like a human colleague. At the same time, Poke will tap Cognition's models and infrastructure, including the new SWE-1.7 software engineering model, to become faster and more reliable.

Poke stands out because it chats like a friend — using slang and humor — rather than acting like a rigid tool. Cognition co-founder Scott Wu explained that the goal is for Devin to feel less like software and more like a co-worker who can crack a joke. The deal also reveals that Wu and fellow Cognition co-founder Walden Yan were early angel investors in Poke, showing a long-standing bet on interaction design.

Poke has seen rapid adoption: users exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform in the three months before the acquisition. But running that level of service was expensive, and Poke struggled to turn a profit, according to co-founder Marvin von Hagen. In June, Poke became the first AI agent approved to run on Apple's Messages for Business platform, a key distribution channel.

For now, nothing changes for Poke through end of 2026. Next year the teams will experiment with combining the two products — Poke could orchestrate multiple Devin coding sessions and help Devin remember tasks across sessions. Ultimately, the deal signals that AI personality is a defensible competitive advantage worth paying up for.