Cognition Acquires Poke in Low Nine-Figure Deal to Humanize Devin

AI coding startup Cognition acquired The Interaction Company of California on July 23, 2026, in a low nine-figure deal, betting that conversational personality is the next battleground in artificial intelligence.

The acquisition brings Poke under Cognition's control. The company plans to integrate Poke's proactive interaction model into Devin, its autonomous AI software engineer, transforming the coding agent from a tool into what Cognition calls a "persistent co-worker."

Personality as Product

Poke launched publicly in March 2026 as a personal AI agent accessible via iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and WhatsApp. The assistant focuses on friendly, proactive conversations for tasks spanning scheduling, health, and finance. In the three months prior to the acquisition, Poke users exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform.

In June 2026, Poke became the first AI agent approved to run on Apple's Messages for Business platform, a milestone that underscored its conversational sophistication.

"You probably prefer it if you have co-workers that have personality, rather than if you have co-workers that are just robots," Marvin von Hagen, co-founder of The Interaction Company, told TechCrunch. Von Hagen noted that Poke had been expensive to run, making it difficult to turn a profit despite being used by hundreds of thousands of people.

Strategic Alignment

The deal carries personal history: Cognition co-founders Scott Wu and Walden Yan were previously angel investors in The Interaction Company. Their early bet now culminates in a full acquisition aimed at merging technical capability with social fluency.

"The Interaction team has built an agent that people love: it's proactive, it knows you, and it's fun to talk to," Wu said on Cognition's blog. "That's exactly how working with Devin should feel, and now we get to build it together."

The Human Layer

The acquisition signals a broader industry shift. As AI models converge on raw capability, companies are increasingly competing on interaction design, personality, and the quality of the user relationship. Cognition's move suggests the next frontier in AI development tools isn't just faster code generation—it's making the AI feel like a colleague who remembers context, takes initiative, and maintains a long-term professional relationship.

By combining Devin's technical autonomy with Poke's conversational warmth, Cognition is redefining what an AI developer experience feels like. The company's bet: in a world of interchangeable models, personality is the differentiator that turns users into collaborators.