Cognition co-founder and CEO Scott Wu (@ScottWu46) said Thursday that Cognition is acquiring The Interaction Company of California, bringing Poke founders Marvin von Hagen (@marvinvonhagen) and Felix Schlegel (@felixms) into the AI coding business.
Cognition announced the acquisition on X and published a separate blog post outlining its plans for Poke, a personal AI agent that operates through Apple Messages, SMS, WhatsApp and Telegram. Cognition did not disclose the purchase price, payment structure or retention terms.
Poke users will retain access to the product, according to Cognition. Wu said Cognition's models and infrastructure will eventually make Poke faster and more reliable, though the announcement did not provide a product roadmap or timeline for the integration.
The deal gives Cognition a consumer product and a team that has focused on the behavioral side of AI agents: how an agent starts conversations, remembers personal context and follows up without waiting for another prompt. Cognition has concentrated primarily on software engineering, where Devin works inside corporate codebases and development tools.
Wu made the product connection explicit. Poke "messages you first, follows up with you, and feels less like software and more like a friend," he wrote. Cognition wants working with Devin to carry the same qualities.
That is a product-design acquisition as much as a distribution move. Poke's interface is an existing messaging thread rather than a dedicated AI application. The agent can search and send email, manage calendars, set recurring reminders and connect to services including Gmail, Notion and Oura. Poke also lets developers create custom integrations through its recipe system.
Cognition says users exchanged more than 100 million messages with Poke over the past three months and describes Poke as serving hundreds of thousands of people. Those figures indicate substantial message volume, but Cognition did not define how many of those users were active during the period or disclose Poke's revenue.
Cognition also says Poke is the only AI agent approved to text natively through Apple Messages. Apple distribution matters because Poke's central bet depends on meeting users inside communication software they already open throughout the day, avoiding the acquisition and retention costs attached to another standalone app.
The founders were already connected
The transaction formalizes an existing relationship between the two founding teams. Wu wrote that he and Cognition co-founder Walden Yan (@walden_yan) were early angel investors in Interaction.
Von Hagen and Schlegel founded the Palo Alto-based Interaction after working together on TUM Boring, a student engineering team that built a tunnel-boring machine for Elon Musk's Not-a-Boring Competition. Von Hagen previously worked at Tesla and studied or conducted work at the Technical University of Munich and MIT. Their background is unusually hardware-heavy for founders who ultimately built a consumer messaging agent.
Interaction said in 2025 that it had raised $15 million at a $100 million valuation in a round led by General Catalyst, with Earlybird Venture Capital, Village Global, Everyday Intelligence and CDTM Venture Fund participating. Interaction also named Wu among its angel investors. The acquisition therefore gives an existing backer control of the product rather than introducing a new strategic buyer.
Cognition has considerably more capital available for the next phase. In May, Cognition said it had raised more than $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation, led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst and 8VC. Cognition also claimed a $492 million revenue run rate and more than tenfold enterprise usage growth since the start of 2026. Those figures are self-reported.
Cognition is assembling the agent stack
Poke extends Cognition beyond its original coding-agent market. Cognition acquired the Windsurf coding editor in July 2025, combining a developer-facing interface with Devin's cloud execution system. The Interaction deal adds a team that built an agent around a different interface: the text conversation.
The common infrastructure is the always-on cloud agent. Devin can receive engineering work, operate in a remote environment and return completed changes. Poke stays available in a messaging thread, monitors connected services and contacts users when it has something actionable. Cognition is betting that the interaction patterns developed for personal tasks can make a technical agent easier to direct and supervise.
Poke's current positioning and brand remain intact for now. The acquisition announcement does not say whether Poke will become a paid Cognition product, share accounts with Devin or supply features directly to Windsurf. It also leaves unanswered how Cognition will separate the personal data connected to Poke from the enterprise code and systems handled by Devin.
Those implementation choices will determine whether Cognition is buying a durable consumer business or using Poke as a product laboratory for Devin. Wu's announcement points first to the latter: Cognition emphasized the Interaction team's approach to proactive agents and said that is how working with Devin should feel.