Cognition buys Poke, a text-message AI agent
Devin's maker Cognition acquired The Interaction Company, whose Poke agent has exchanged over 100 million texts with users in three months on Apple Messages.
Cognition, the company behind the autonomous coding agent Devin, announced on July 23 that it has acquired The Interaction Company of California, maker of the personal AI agent Poke. Poke lives inside a user’s text messages, messaging first and following up rather than waiting to be prompted, and Cognition puts total message volume over 100 million texted back and forth across just the past quarter. Poke is currently the sole AI agent Apple has cleared for native texting on its Messages platform. Deal terms were not disclosed. Cognition’s blog post notes its co-founders were early angel investors in Interaction before the acquisition.
Cognition’s stated rationale is architectural alignment rather than product expansion for its own sake: both Devin and Poke are built around “always-on cloud agents” that keep working and reaching out between sessions, and Cognition plans to move Poke onto its own models and infrastructure to improve speed and reliability without changing the user experience. That is the same “always-on” bet Cognition made days earlier with Devin Outposts, which lets Devin execute on infrastructure a customer controls rather than only in Cognition’s cloud.
The acquisition is a data point for anyone whose product depends on a smaller AI-agent vendor staying independent: a well-funded coding-agent company just bought a consumer messaging-agent startup outright, following the pattern of labs and agent platforms folding smaller tools into themselves as the market consolidates. If a vendor you rely on occupies a narrow but well-used niche, plan for the possibility it gets absorbed by a larger platform rather than staying a standalone product.