Cognition Acquires Poke to Give Devin Coding Agent a Personality

{ "title": "Cognition Acquires Poke AI Assistant in Nine-Figure Deal", "body": "Cognition, the AI coding startup behind the Devin software engineering agent, has acquired Poke, the AI assistant known for chatting like a friend. The deal, confirmed by Poke co-founder Marvin von Hagen, values the startup in the "low nine figures" and signals a bet that how an AI talks matters as much as what it knows.\n\nPoke launched in March 2026 and quickly amassed hundreds of thousands of users who exchanged over 100 million messages in the past three months alone. The assistant operates across iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and WhatsApp in some markets, handling travel, health, finance, scheduling, education, email, reminders, and to-dos. Its defining feature is personality: it uses slang, cracks jokes, and engages in familiar conversation rather than delivering tool-like responses.\n\n## Why Personality Matters for a Coding Agent\n\nCognition co-founder Scott Wu announced the acquisition in a blog post, revealing that both he and fellow co-founder Walden Yan were angel investors in Poke before the deal. Wu framed the acquisition as a way to make Devin feel less like software and more like a colleague.\n\n"You probably prefer it if you have co-workers that have personality, rather than if you have co-workers that are just robots," Wu said. "When you have co-workers that are also software engineers, they can also make a joke. And you'll find it funny and enjoyable."\n\nWu added: "The Interaction team has built an agent that people love: it's proactive, it knows you, and it's fun to talk to. That's exactly how working with Devin should feel, and now we get to build it together."\n\nThe acquisition underscores a growing belief inside Cognition that an AI assistant's interaction style will become as valuable as the underlying models. Poke's personality, the company argues, could add value to Devin's coding agent, which currently handles one pull request at a time and operates more like a tool than a teammate.\n\n## No Immediate Changes for Poke Users\n\nFor now, nothing changes for Poke through the end of 2026. The service will remain on Apple's Messages for Business platform, where it became the first AI agent approved in June 2026. Poke plans to stay on Apple's platform, and users can continue to engage via iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and WhatsApp in supported markets.\n\nDespite its popularity, Poke was expensive to run, making profit difficult. The large user base and high message volume drove significant infrastructure costs, a challenge that Cognition's resources and existing model infrastructure may help address. Poke's subscription cost $100 per year, but that revenue did not cover the operational expenses.\n\n## Long-Term Vision: Poke Orchestrates Devin, Devin Gets a Personality\n\nStarting next year, the combined team will experiment with improvements for both Poke and Devin. Poke will begin using Cognition's newest software engineering model, SWE-1.7, for some tasks. The full combination of Poke and Devin has not been ruled out.\n\n"I think in the long term Poke can be more reliable with orchestrating all these coding [tasks] … and, at the same time, Devin could become more like Poke," Wu said.\n\nOne concrete possibility: Poke could orchestrate multiple Devin sessions. Currently, Devin can only do one pull request at a time. "Like right now, Devin can only do one PR — pull request — at a time … I think there's a lot of value in having Poke orchestrate different Devin sessions," Wu explained.\n\nPoke could also help Devin remember tasks across sessions, acting as a persistent co-worker rather than a stateless tool. "It would be good to have a persistent co-worker," Wu said.\n\n## The Road Ahead\n\nThe deal marks a significant bet on the importance of AI personality in enterprise tools. By folding Poke's conversational style into Devin, Cognition hopes to create a coding assistant that developers actually enjoy talking to — one that can crack a joke, remember context, and orchestrate complex workflows across multiple sessions.\n\nFor Poke's existing users, the service continues as before. For Cognition, the acquisition provides a proven interaction model and a large, engaged user base to learn from. The experiments beginning next year will determine how deeply Poke's personality gets woven into Devin — and whether a coding agent that talks like a friend can also ship code like a pro. The company's valuation in the low nine figures, around $330 million, reflects the strategic bet on conversational AI.\n\n## Related on Neura Market\n\n- Cognition AI Startup Overview\n- AI Coding Assistants Sector\n- Devin Product Page" }