Cognition Acquires The Interaction Company, Maker of SMS-Native AI Agent "Poke"
Cognition, the maker of autonomous AI software engineer Devin, has announced the acquisition of The Interaction Company of California, creators of Poke, a personal AI agent that operates inside text messages. Coming on the heels of the TierZero acquisition, this deal signals Cognition’s expansion beyond coding assistance into the territory of always-on, conversational personal agents.
Details
- What Poke is: A personal AI agent that lives inside SMS, proactively reaching out and following up with users in a way that feels more like a friend than traditional software
- Track record: Poke has facilitated over 100 million message exchanges in the past three months and is described as the only AI agent natively approved to operate on Apple Messages
- The Interaction Company: Led by Marvin and his team. Cognition CEO Scott Wu and co-founder Walden revealed they had been early investors in Interaction well before the acquisition
- Rationale: “Together, we’re excited to shape the way humans and AI collaborate for the future,” said Scott Wu. Both companies had independently been betting on always-on cloud agents
- What’s next: Poke users will see no immediate changes, but Cognition plans to eventually enhance the product’s speed and reliability using its own models and infrastructure
How to try it
- Poke remains available as-is via text message; there are no immediate service changes from the acquisition
- Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed
- Following Devin (code generation) and TierZero (production operations), this acquisition marks Cognition’s move into conversational personal agents as a third pillar of its product lineup