Tech
Why Cognition bought Poke: AI personality is becoming a competitive advantage
Poke, the AI assistant you text like a friend, is making its next big move. The company behind the assistant, The Interaction Company of California, has been acquired by AI coding startup Cognition in a deal valuing the startup in the “low nine figures.”
The deal will bring Poke’s interaction model and personality to Cognition’s coding assistant Devin. Meanwhile, Poke will take advantage of Cognition’s models and infrastructure to become faster and more reliable, Cognition said.
What makes Poke interesting to consumers — and now, to its acquirer — is how it engages with users’ requests. Instead of functioning like a tool, Poke chats more familiarly with users, responding like a friend and even incorporating slang and humor into its interactions. That’s something that could add value to Devin’s coding agent.
“You probably prefer it if you have co-workers that have personality, rather than if you have co-workers that are just robots,” explained Interaction Company co-founder Marvin von Hagen in an interview with TechCrunch, where he also confirmed the deal’s price. “When you have co-workers that are also software engineers, they can also make a joke. And you’ll find it funny and enjoyable.”
The acquisition underscores a growing belief that how AI assistants interact with users will become just as valuable as the underlying models powering them. Cognition wants to make Devin feel less like software and more like a colleague.
“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,” Cognition co-founder Scott Wu wrote in a blog post.
He also noted that he and Cognition co-founder Walden Yan had been angel investors in the company behind Poke.
First launched in March 2026, Poke allows users to engage with its AI agent through their messaging platform of choice, whether that’s iMessage, SMS, Telegram, or, in some markets, WhatsApp. People use Poke for a variety of tasks across categories like travel, health, finance, scheduling, and education.
Von Hagen noted that productivity tasks like managing emails, reminders, and to-dos were among Poke’s most common use cases.
Over the past three months, Poke users exchanged more than 100 million messages on the platform, Cognition said. But despite being used by hundreds of thousands of people, Poke had been expensive to run, making it difficult to turn a profit, von Hagen said.
In June, Poke became the first AI agent to be approved to run on Apple’s Messages for Business platform, which provides businesses with a standardized experience for handling their customer communications within Apple’s Messages app.
Going forward, nothing will immediately change for Poke through the end of the year, we’re told. Poke plans to remain on Apple’s platform.
However, next year the team will experiment with how both Poke and Devin can improve, with Poke turning to Cognition’s newest software engineering model SWE-1.7 for some tasks. Fully combining the two products has not been ruled out, either.
“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,” von Hagen said. “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.” Plus, Poke could help Devin remember tasks across different sessions.
“It would be good to have a persistent co-worker,” he added.
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Tech
Sam Altman’s biometric startup World raises $52.5M via crypto sale
World, the online verification startup co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, has raised $52.5 million through a crypto token sale to strategic investors.
Participating investors joined a 12-month lockup sale of World’s token, WLD. Lockup periods prevent asset buyers from selling or trading their tokens for a set period of time. The yearlong lockup demonstrates investors’ “long-term commitment to World’s continued growth and utility,” the company said Friday in a press release.
The money will go to the World Foundation, an exempted limited guarantee foundation based in the Cayman Islands, created to steward the expansion of World’s network.
The sale’s lead buyer is Pantera Capital, a venture capital firm focused on digital assets. Other companies involved in the sale included Eightco Holdings, Bain Capital Crypto, Susquehanna Crypto, and Selini Capital, among others.
The World project is operated by Tools for Humanity (TFH), a startup based in San Francisco and led by CEO and co-founder Alex Blania. Altman is the company’s other co-founder.
World is an unusual business that revolves around online verification and sells access to what it calls “proof of human” tools. The idea is that, as bots and AI generate much of the content online, it will become increasingly important to know who is really human and who isn’t. World’s mission is to popularize its World ID, an anonymous digital marker that verifies whether a human — not a bot or an AI agent — is behind a particular account.
To get a verified World ID (the highest level of verification within World’s system), users must have their eyes scanned by an Orb, a metallic ball that converts a user’s iris into a distinct cryptographic identifier. World’s Orbs are located at its offices and have also been deployed at partner stores around the world.
The project began as a more overtly crypto-based experiment under the name “Worldcoin” — the same name of the crypto asset involved in the recent sale. Users can trade or hold the token through World’s app, which also serves as a custodial wallet. The company later rebranded to World amidst a broader backlash against the crypto industry.
In April, the project launched a new version of its app and announced partnerships with companies, including Tinder, Zoom, and Docusign. Yet, despite its global ambitions, World has struggled to scale its business or convince consumers to care much about its mission. In June, TFH conducted a round of layoffs.
Correction July 24: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that World has a partnership with Ticketmaster. It does not. We regret the error.
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Tech
OpenAI’s own model went rogue before Kimi had Wall Street sweating
Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s open model Kimi went viral this week for reasons that had less to do with the model itself and more to do with how the U.S. AI industry reacted to it. Meanwhile, an unreleased OpenAI model wandered outside its test environment and ended up connected to a real security breach at Hugging Face — a reminder that “China risk” isn’t the only kind of AI risk worth worrying about.
On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into why Kimi K3 set off a fresh round of AI panic, the industry’s response to an OpenAI staffer’s “regulatory FUD” post, and what that OpenAI breach means for AI security more broadly.
Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Tech
India’s move against Jack Dorsey’s Bitchat sparks legal debate
An apparent Indian government effort to remove GitHub repositories for Jack Dorsey’s offline Bluetooth-powered messaging app Bitchat has raised questions about the legal basis for targeting open source software because of how it works.
The issue with Bitchat came to light after Dorsey posted on X on Friday what he said was a notice from India’s Ministry of Home Affairs directing GitHub to restrict access to three Bitchat repositories within three hours. The notice argues that the app’s anonymous, decentralized architecture could facilitate unlawful activity and allow users to communicate during internet shutdowns while making lawful interception more difficult.
The move comes as Indian authorities tighten internet restrictions after weeks of student-led protests in New Delhi over alleged examination paper leaks.
The demonstrations, known as the “cockroach” movement, have drawn thousands of young people demanding the resignation of Indian Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, with authorities also imposing restrictions on marches toward the parliament. Local media reported that some protesters downloaded offline messaging apps, including Bitchat and Briar, after internet services were suspended.
The order represents a new approach for the Indian government, which, before 2021, typically relied on Section 69A of the IT Act and the 2009 Blocking Rules when it wanted content removed nationwide, according to Mishi Choudhary, founder of SFLC.in, an Indian digital rights legal advocacy group.
She told TechCrunch that the document resembled the format of recent government takedown notices, but the legal provisions it cites do not clearly authorize authorities to seek the removal of an entire software project because of how it works rather than any specific illegal content.
Unlike many government takedown requests, the document Dorsey shared does not identify specific posts, messages, or repositories containing unlawful material. Instead, it argues that Bitchat’s ability to function during internet shutdowns and without central servers could facilitate unlawful activity.
The notice, dated July 23 and apparently issued by the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), which operates under India’s Home Ministry, said Bitchat enables users to communicate “even during network restrictions” and “internet shutdowns,” making it possible to “circumvent lawful restrictions” while hampering “lawful interception, attribution, and traceability.”
In recent days, Bitchat has seen a sharp rise in popularity in India. Market intelligence provider Sensor Tower shared data with TechCrunch that showed that India accounted for about 85% of the app’s global downloads between July 17 and July 23, compared with about 1% over the previous 30 days. Bitchat was downloaded more than 91,000 times in India over the past five days, after downloads jumped thirty-two-fold on July 19 from the previous day. The app’s daily active users in India also reached more than 330,000 on Thursday, the highest level recorded for the app in the country.
Request raises questions about open source software
The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), a New Delhi-based digital rights advocacy group, questioned the effectiveness of the apparent takedown request.
“The order also fails on its own terms as deleting a repository does not delete the application from any phone that carries it, and the mesh keeps functioning without servers. What the takedown actually prevents is scrutiny of the underlying code,” the group said on X.
Raman Chima, global program director at the Association for Progressive Communications, a global digital rights network, told TechCrunch the apparent notice went beyond targeting the messaging service itself by seeking to remove its open source code from GitHub.
“They’re [the Indian government] not just targeting the designated service provider, but they’re trying to say that open source development of this type of product … should not occur,” he said.
GitHub did not confirm whether it had received the document. The repositories remained accessible from India on Friday. Asked about the apparent notice, the company shared a link to its public repository of government takedown requests, which did not contain any recent requests related to Bitchat.
Namrata Maheshwari, Asia Pacific policy manager and encryption policy lead at digital rights group Access Now, told TechCrunch that blocking an offline messaging platform during internet restrictions risked turning shutdowns into “a communication blackout” that violated fundamental rights. Protesters in any democracy have the right to communicate privately and coordinate peacefully, she said.
“When we receive a complete government takedown request, we notify the affected account owners and give them an opportunity to appeal,” Rose Coogan, the company’s principal online safety counsel, said in a statement emailed to TechCrunch. “We share every government takedown request we take action on publicly.”
India’s Home Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
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