Cognition buys Poke for a low-nine-figure sum, betting assistant personality is the moat

On 24 July 2026 Cognition acquired The Interaction Company of California, maker of the messaging-native assistant Poke, at a price co-founder Marvin von Hagen put in the "low nine figures." Poke launched in March 2026, reached hundreds of thousands of users who exchanged more than 100 million messages over three months, and in June became the first AI agent approved on Apple's Messages for Business — while being expensive to run. Cognition plans to fold its interaction model into the Devin coding agent, with von Hagen describing an end state where Poke orchestrates Devin sessions and remembers tasks across them.

What it means The bet is that the conversational surface and cross-session memory — not the underlying model — is what users stay for. Any team shipping an agent has to take a position on that, because it decides where the engineering money goes.