Skip to content
NewsFunding & M&A

Cognition acquires Poke, first AI agent on Apple Messages for Business, in low-nine-figure deal

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

Cognition paid low nine figures to buy The Interaction Company, the startup behind Poke, an AI personal agent that operates inside iMessage and SMS. The deal is a direct bet that AI conversational personality is now a competitive moat worth paying for.

Cognition acquires Poke, first AI agent on Apple Messages for Business, in low-nine-figure deal

Cognition spent low nine figures on July 23 to acquire The Interaction Company, the startup behind Poke, making a public argument that AI personality and conversational style are now worth paying nine figures to own. Poke is a personal AI agent that operates inside iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and WhatsApp. Three days earlier, Cognition had acquired production-automation startup TierZero, putting two deals on the board in less than a week.

What

The Interaction Company co-founder Marvin von Hagen confirmed the deal price in a TechCrunch interview. Poke launched in March 2026 and accumulated more than 100 million messages exchanged over its first three months, per TechCrunch, with hundreds of thousands of active users. In June 2026, Poke became the first standalone AI agent approved to operate on Apple's Messages for Business platform.

Cognition co-founder Scott Wu wrote in a company blog post that what drew the company to Poke was not raw capability but behavior: Poke "proactively texts you, knows you, and it's fun to talk to." Both Cognition co-founders, Wu and Walden Yan, had previously invested in The Interaction Company as angels.

On July 20, three days before the Poke deal closed, Cognition separately acquired TierZero, a post-deployment software automation startup. TierZero had grown to serve tens of thousands of engineers at companies including Brex, Discord, and Drata, per Accel, its lead seed investor. Cognition said TierZero's fault-detection and incident-response capabilities will integrate into Devin to reduce time engineers spend on production issues.

Why it matters

The Poke acquisition carries a specific thesis that Devin users should notice. Cognition is framing conversational personality as a competitive variable, not just a product feature. Von Hagen told TechCrunch that Poke was expensive to run and struggled to reach profitability on its own. Cognition absorbed the cost because it sees the interaction model as something it could not easily replicate in-house.

For teams using Devin, nothing changes immediately. Cognition said Poke will keep operating as a standalone product through the end of 2026 and will stay on Apple's platform. Integration work begins in 2027, starting with Poke running on Cognition's SWE-1.7 model for some tasks. The longer-term scenario von Hagen described has Poke acting as an orchestration layer across multiple Devin sessions, enabling Devin to run several pull requests in parallel rather than one at a time. Neither timeline nor availability for that capability was announced.

The Apple Messages for Business approval is a separate asset. Apple controls that approval tightly. An AI agent already on that platform has a distribution surface that reaches iPhone users inside an app they already use daily, without requiring a separate install.

What to watch next

Watch for a Cognition funding announcement. Two acquisitions in one week add meaningful integration and operating costs. The other near-term signal is whether the two-acquisition thesis holds: TierZero handles what Devin builds in production; Poke handles how Devin communicates with the engineer. If Cognition can ship that combination, the resulting agent would be materially different from what competitors offer today.

Sources