Cognition Acquires the Team Behind Poke: 100 Million Messages in Three Months

Cognition, the company behind the AI engineer Devin, announced that The Interaction Company of California, creator of the personal agent Poke, is joining it. The blog post was signed by Scott, Cognition's chief. Its headline number: over the past three months, users exchanged more than 100M messages with Poke. The deal's price and structure were not disclosed.

What Poke is

Poke is a personal agent that lives in text messages. There is no separate app with a chat window: the conversation happens where people already text their friends. The agent writes first, returns to unresolved questions, and, in Cognition's description, feels more like a buddy than like software.

Cognition says Poke remains the only AI agent approved to send messages natively in Apple Messages. If that is true, it is a rare distribution channel: Apple tightly controls who can write in iMessage and how, and the restriction cannot simply be bypassed.

According to Scott, the audience runs to hundreds of thousands of people. For a consumer agent that does not lean on the big brand of a major lab, that is a notable base.

Why Cognition wants it

Devin works in the enterprise segment: as the post puts it, some of the largest companies in the world use it for software development. Poke covers the opposite end: the everyday life of an ordinary person. The common denominator is stated outright: both teams have bet from the start on cloud agents that run continuously.

There is a product logic as well. Scott writes that the Interaction team built an agent people love: it is proactive, it knows the user, and it is pleasant to talk to. That, in his words, is how working with Devin should feel. In other words, Cognition is buying not just technology but also experience in building an interface where the agent initiates contact itself instead of waiting for a request.

Personal ties play a role too. Scott and Walden, a Cognition co-founder, were early angel investors in Interaction and have known Marvin and his team for several years. It is a deal inside a circle where both sides know each other's work well.

What is known and what is not

• Subject of the deal: The Interaction Company of California, the Poke product.
• Activity: more than 100M messages in three months.
• Audience: hundreds of thousands of users.
• Channel: native sending in Apple Messages.
• Deal terms, price, and the fate of team members by role: not disclosed.
• Technical integration: in the future, Poke will get Cognition's models and infrastructure; the timing is given only as "soon."

The promise of "faster and more reliable" remains a declaration for now. Without latency, cost-per-response, and failure-rate metrics, the effect cannot be assessed. The post also does not say which Cognition models will run under the hood of Poke or whether they will replace its current providers.

Practical takeaways

For Poke users, nothing changes: the product works as before. Two things are worth watching: whether subscription terms and the message-retention policy change after the move to Cognition's infrastructure. For a personal agent that knows a lot about a person, this is a critical question.

For agent developers, the signal is different. The market is clearly moving toward agents that run continuously in the cloud and reach out on their own instead of answering one-off requests. Channels like iMessage, which require separate permission from the platform, are becoming a real competitive advantage. Anyone building similar products should work out in advance how to get that access, and should not assume it will become available later.

For Devin's enterprise customers, the open question is whether Poke's proactive style will carry over into a work tool: an agent that reminds you on its own about a stalled pull request or a failing test looks like a logical next step. For now it is an intention, not a release, and confirmation should be sought in Cognition's product updates.