Cognition Buys Poke Parent in Low 9-Figure Deal to Humanize Devin
Updated
Updated · TechCrunch · Jul 24
Cognition Buys Poke Parent in Low 9-Figure Deal to Humanize Devin
1 articles · Updated · TechCrunch · Jul 24
Summary
A low nine-figure acquisition will fold Poke’s parent, The Interaction Company, into Cognition, with the startup aiming to make coding assistant Devin feel more like a co-worker than a tool.
Poke’s value lies in its conversational style—friendly, proactive and humorous—which Cognition said will be paired with Devin, while Poke gains faster, more reliable performance from Cognition’s models and infrastructure.
100 million-plus messages were exchanged on Poke in the past three months, showing strong engagement, but co-founder Marvin von Hagen said the consumer assistant was expensive to run and hard to make profitable.
Through the end of 2026, Poke will stay on Apple’s Messages for Business platform with no immediate user changes; next year the teams plan experiments using Cognition’s SWE-1.7 and may more tightly combine Poke and Devin.
The deal highlights a broader AI shift: interaction design and personality are increasingly being treated as strategic assets alongside the underlying models.