Cognition Acquires Poke Maker The Interaction Company: Why the Devin Developer Bought a Texting Agent

Cognition, the company behind the coding agent Devin, announced on July 23, 2026 that it is welcoming The Interaction Company of California, maker of the personal AI agent Poke, to the company¹. The announcement came from CEO Scott Wu on the official blog. Terms were not disclosed, though TechCrunch reports the deal valued the startup in the “low nine figures”².

A company that builds coding agents just paid hundreds of millions of dollars for a consumer agent that texts you like a friend. The pairing points at a shift in how AI agents compete: not just on model performance, but on how they talk to you.

What Poke is: an agent that lives in your texts

Poke is a personal AI agent that lives inside text messages¹. Where most AI assistants wait to be opened, Poke messages you first and follows up on its own — Cognition describes it as feeling “less like software and more like a friend”¹.

Since launching in March 2026, usage has grown quickly: people exchanged more than 100 million messages with Poke in the last three months alone¹², with users numbering in the hundreds of thousands¹. In June 2026, Poke became the first AI agent approved to run on Apple’s Messages for Business platform² — Cognition highlights it as “the only AI agent approved to text natively on Apple Messages”¹.

TechCrunch also notes a harder reality: Poke had been expensive to run, making it difficult to turn a profit². A fast-growing consumer agent joining a better-resourced infrastructure company is part of the story here.

Why Cognition bought it: bringing Poke’s personality to Devin

Scott Wu frames the acquisition around Poke’s proactivity and personality: “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”¹. He adds that both teams have been making the same bet — always-on cloud agents¹.

According to TechCrunch, Wu and Cognition co-founder Walden Yan were angel investors in Poke’s maker before the deal², and The Interaction Company’s co-founders include Marvin von Hagen².

For now, little changes on the product side. Poke users can continue using the product just as before¹; TechCrunch reports nothing will change for Poke through the end of the year, with integration experiments between the two products starting in 2027². Poke, meanwhile, gains Cognition’s models and infrastructure to become faster and more reliable¹.

The backstory: Cognition assembles its agent by acquisition

Cognition has repeatedly filled in missing pieces by buying them. It acquired the AI code editor Windsurf in July 2025, then folded Windsurf into Devin Desktop in June 2026, uniting its cloud agent with a local development environment. On the in-house side, it shipped the fast agent model SWE-1.5 in October 2025.

Acquisitions are an industry-wide pattern among agent companies. OpenAI agreed to acquire the cloud development environment Ona in June 2026, and the race to own everything around the model — execution environments, user experience — keeps escalating. The Poke deal extends that competition from developer tooling into conversational experience and personality.

What it means for you: agents that reach out instead of waiting

For readers evaluating or using Devin among AI coding tools, nothing changes in the short term. The thing to watch is the integration work slated for 2027, which could bring Poke-style behavior to Devin: reporting progress unprompted, asking clarifying questions before you think to check in.

More broadly, the deal suggests the evaluation criteria for workplace agents are shifting. Given comparable capability, an agent that works unattended, reaches out with updates, and knows when to ask is worth more in practice. When comparing tools, it is worth looking past benchmark scores at how an agent reports, escalates, and confirms — the operational design that this acquisition just priced in the hundreds of millions.