Why Cognition bought Poke: AI personality is becoming a competitive advantage

Poke never tried to feel like software. You text it like you'd text a buddy, slang and jokes included, and it handles your email, your reminders, your travel bookings. That personality is exactly what Cognition, the company behind the AI coding agent Devin, just paid a low-nine-figure sum to acquire.

The logic here is pretty simple once you say it out loud. Cognition co-founder Scott Wu wants Devin to feel less like a tool you operate and more like a colleague you work alongside. Interaction Company co-founder Marvin von Hagen put it bluntly: you'd rather have coworkers with personality than robots, and if your coworker happens to be a software engineer who can crack a joke, you'll enjoy the collaboration more. That's the bet Cognition is making with real money.

The mechanics of the deal go both ways. Poke's interaction style and its knack for feeling proactive and personal will get folded into Devin. In exchange, Poke gets access to Cognition's infrastructure and models, including its newest coding model, SWE-1.7, which should make Poke faster and more reliable than it's been. That reliability mattered because Poke, despite racking up more than 100 million messages from users over just the last three months, was reportedly expensive to run and hadn't found a path to profitability on its own.

Nothing changes immediately. Poke stays live through the end of the year on Apple's Messages for Business platform, where it became the first approved AI agent back in June. But 2026 is when the real experimentation starts, and von Hagen has already floated the idea of Poke eventually orchestrating multiple Devin coding sessions at once, since Devin currently handles just one pull request at a time. He also wants Poke to give Devin something like persistent memory across sessions, turning it into what he calls a real coworker rather than a tool you reopen from scratch every time.

Wu and von Hagen weren't strangers before this, either. Wu and fellow Cognition founder Walden Yan had already been angel investors in Poke's parent company, so this acquisition reads less like a cold takeover and more like a relationship reaching its logical conclusion.