Devin-maker Cognition acquires Poke, the AI agent native to Apple Messages
What's the deal? Cognition, the company behind autonomous coding agent Devin, has acquired The Interaction Company of California, maker of the texting assistant PokeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. Chief executive officer Scott WuDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → announced the deal on Cognition's blog on July 23, 2026. Financial terms were not disclosed.
What is Poke? It is a personal AI agent that lives inside text messages, handling tasks like planning, calendar management, and flight booking. Unlike most agents, it messages users first rather than waiting to be opened. Poke launched publicly in March 2026 and has exchanged more than 100 million messages in the three months before the acquisition.
Why it matters: Poke is the only AI agent approved to text natively on Apple Messages. Most rivals live in a browser tab or standalone app that users must remember to open; Poke sits inside a thread already open on the phone — a distribution edge that is hard to replicate.
What's the endgame? Cognition frames Devin and Poke as two expressions of one thesis: "always-on cloud agents" that work in the background and report back. "From the beginning, our teams have been making the same bet," Wu wrote. Devin serves enterprise software engineering; Poke targets everyday consumer life.
Any prior ties? Wu and his co-founder were early angel investors in Interaction, and Cognition says it has known founder Marvin von HagenDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and his team for years.
What changes for users? Nothing on day one. Cognition says existing Poke users can keep using the product unchanged, with a near-term plan to route its own models and infrastructure into Poke to improve speed and reliability.
The signal: The deal shows a coding-agent company betting that enterprise and consumer AI assistants are one architecture, not two. By pairing Devin's engineering muscle with Poke's rare native foothold in Apple Messages, Cognition is wagering that proactive, always-on agents — not passive chatbots — define where the market is headed.
Read more: explainx.ai, Cognition
