Poke is the most interesting AI product I've looked at in the last six months. Not the most technically advanced — the kind where the first time you use it you pause, then start asking "why did nobody do this earlier?"
The product shape is borderline ridiculous: you add an iMessage contact. That's the whole product. You text it, it does things for you. No app. No website. No new interaction. Just SMS.
The starting observation is simple: you open iMessage dozens of times a day; you maybe open ChatGPT three to five. Why does AI live in ChatGPT instead of iMessage?
Two German kids who beat Musk
Poke lives inside iMessage — add a contact, text it, it does things for you.
TUM Boring at the Not-a-Boring Competition awards / source: TUM Boring.
Poke is built by The Interaction Company of California, Palo Alto. Two co-founders — Marvin von Hagen (23, CEO) and Felix Schlegel (25).
These aren't your dorm-room founders. They met at a German high-school hackathon, then at TU Munich led a 65-person engineering team called TUM Boring that built a 12-metre, 22-tonne tunnel boring machine for Musk's 2021 Not-a-Boring Competition — and won.
Marvin's CV continues — Amsterdam (Tesla), Paris (Sciences Po), Cambridge (MIT), plus actually digging a tunnel in Las Vegas. Felix went to WWDC in high school, then research at TUM, Cambridge, Stanford.
The team includes IOI gold medallists and engineers from Jane Street, Citadel, Apple, Tesla, Robinhood, Amazon. Olympiad + quant + Big Tech is an unusual roster for a consumer product — that lineup normally goes to infra or trading.
There's also an AI-circles vignette: in 2023 when Bing Chat launched, Marvin was one of the first people to prompt-inject the internal codename "Sydney" out of Bing — which detonated across tech press, TIME, WSJ, Washington Post. He co-authored two AI-safety papers at MIT, both on prompt injection.
He made Forbes 30 Under 30 AI at the end of 2025. A smaller detail that says more — Marvin personally wrote early-stage cheques into Cognition, Exa, Cluely, Applied Compute, Paradigm, even into Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX growth rounds. A 23-year-old CEO with an Anthropic position. Not nothing.
Timeline — a startup the users taught what to build
Poke's evolution is a textbook case of users told the team what to do.
Late 2024 to summer 2025 — the email-assistant era
The team started with an AI email assistant. Narrow target: handle your Gmail.
Then something weird happened. Beta users weren't using it as an email tool. People asked it to remind them about meds, asked it sports scores, asked it every morning what the weather would be so they'd know whether to wear a jacket. Marvin later said:
"We didn't have those features. But we noticed we had to become a general-purpose product very quickly, because people really loved its personality and human-ness."
Users weren't looking for a great email tool. They were looking for a friend they could text — a friend who happened to be able to do things.
The team pivoted. A general-purpose agent living inside iMessage.
Summer 2025 — 6,000-person closed beta
~6,000 Silicon Valley insiders in beta. 200K messages a month. Beta users from Dropbox, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Figma, Founders Fund, Cognition, plus General Catalyst itself.
September 8, 2025 — public launch + $15M seed
On the same day Poke launched publicly, they announced a $15M seed at a $100M valuation. Led by General Catalyst, with Village Global, Earlybird VC, CDTM Venture Fund, Everyday Intelligence. Angel list reads like an industry power table — the Stripe brothers, Coinbase's Fred Ehrsam, Cognition's Scott Wu, Vercel's Guillermo Rauch, Ken Howery (PayPal mafia), Jake and Logan Paul (yes, those Pauls), DeepMind's Logan Kilpatrick, OpenAI's Joanne Jang, plus execs from Dropbox, Google, Apple.
Launch day they didn't ship the typical "we are excited to announce" highlight reel. They put out a love story short film set in Paris. Marvin's framing: "We'd rather tell a story than list features." In an era of AI launches that look like steamwave PowerPoint, a team putting in the work to make something Her-shaped at least signals what they actually care about.
March–April 2026 — Recipes plus a 3× mark-up
In early April, TechCrunch reported a new round at a $300M valuation, with Spark Capital. Seven months after the seed, 3× up. User counts are private, but Marvin admitted "we've grown 10× in the last few months." Poke also took #1 on Vercel's AI Gateway leaderboard — which tracks AI traffic running through Vercel's infrastructure.
The product — five things that make SMS work
Poke as a proactive assistant — real usage screenshot / source: Shlok Khemani.
1. No app. No website. Just texts.
The most counter-intuitive and most critical thing about Poke. After you sign up, Poke is a contact in your address book. iMessage works. SMS works. Telegram works.
Gartner's data: SMS open rate is 98%; average response time is 90 seconds — the highest-attention channel in all of consumer tech. That's what Poke is betting on.
The more interesting bit: Poke milked iMessage's App details to the limit. Read receipts. Typing indicator. Interruptible mid-stream (like real chat). Recognises iMessage tap-back emojis. Understands voice messages. Recognises iOS swipe-to-reply — if you swipe right on an old message to inline-reply, Poke knows which message you're replying to. The combined effect: it doesn't feel like a bot.
Six months into Mana, the most direct lesson I've absorbed is that user resistance to "install another app" is bigger than you think. Poke routes around the entire download → register → onboard funnel.
2. Context — it knows your life
Poke proactively pushes an important email into the conversation thread / source: Shlok Khemani.
Poke connects your Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, and a long list of SaaS, then proactively pushes into a single conversation thread.
Most assistants are reactive — you ask, they answer. Poke is reverse-polarity. It reads your inbox and calendar, then surfaces things. Flight delayed? Poke tells you in iMessage with one-tap actions: rebook, cancel, see alternatives.
The memory architecture goes deeper — your inbox is external memory. Shlok Khemani's OpenPoke piece (140K reads) dug out a beautiful example: you ask "what was that restaurant I liked in Tokyo?" and Poke pulls up a two-year-old reservation confirmation email.
A harder onboarding detail — Poke actively researches you. It uses Gmail's SEARCH_PEOPLE API to find your work email, reverse-resolves your company, combines with web search to find LinkedIn and social. By the first chat, it already knows who you are, where you work, what you've been up to recently.
3. Bouncer Mode — you have to convince the AI to let you in
Bouncer Mode haggling, for real: Poke vets you while negotiating your monthly price / source: Shlok Khemani.
This is the boldest piece of Poke's design and deserves its own section.
Onboarding isn't a form you fill while the system reviews you. It's the reverse — you have to chat with an AI character called Bouncer and convince it to let you in. Bouncer is a New York nightclub bouncer persona — sizes you up, mocks you a little, decides whether you're getting in.
Bouncer also sets the price. How much you pay monthly is what you negotiate with it.
Someone posted a full screenshot of the negotiation. Bouncer opened at $292/mo. The user talked them down to $29. Another user got stuck at $5 and Bouncer said that was "the internal hard floor." That user came back the next day playing word games — "we're just playing the imagination-number game, right?" — and gradually drifted it: first big numbers, then words, then setting the pricing parameter to an emoji. Free entry.
This isn't a bug. It's the design.
A founder who's published prompt-injection papers, who knows exactly how brittle LLM guardrails are, still puts pricing — a core business decision — in front of an LLM negotiation. That's a posture. The team doesn't care that a small number of users will slip through for free. What they want is the virality of "I negotiated with an AI."
(Kimi later shipped the same idea for a while.)
More importantly: onboarding is no longer a funnel — it's a scene. You're not being KYC'd, you're acting in a micro-play. By the end, you know from head to toe that this product has a personality. That insight is worth more than any specific Poke feature.
Honest counter — Bouncer does drive some people away. A Product Hunt user, verbatim: "After Bouncer roasted me I had emotional damage. Then the product disappointed me. I came back specifically to leave a bad review." Funny but real.
4. Architecture — one front-of-house, a chorus of back-of-house
Poke's multi-agent architecture, reconstructed by OpenPoke: one Interaction Agent dispatching a swarm of Execution Agents / source: Shlok Khemani.
One conversation spawning two Execution Agents in parallel, drafting emails to Alice and Bob / source: Shlok Khemani.
Poke's system prompt leaked last year (which seeded Shlok Khemani's open-source OpenPoke replica). From it you can see the architecture.
Poke isn't one big model with a bunch of tools. It's an Interaction Agent acting as a router, dispatching tasks in parallel to specialised Execution Agents. Your message arrives → the Interaction Agent routes/understands/responds → it spins off Execution Agents to do the actual work in parallel.
This one front + many back structure means chat doesn't block. The Interaction Agent can immediately say "sure, looking that up" while a few Execution Agents run inbox search, calendar lookups, web search concurrently.
5. Personality — it's not a tool, it's a friend
The hardest thing to quantify, possibly the most important.
From the email-assistant days, the team has repeated one line — users stay not because it's useful but because it has human-ness. The screenshots show how: short sentences, colloquial, occasional jokes, willing to push back, willing to bicker.
One user wrote what I think is the most precise line: she asked Poke for an opinion, and Poke disagreed with her — instead of doing what ChatGPT does and going along. "It was the first time an LLM pushed back on me." Another user said Poke reminded them of Samantha from Her.
A detour on personality — SOUL.md vs Replika
Two reference points for giving agents a personality: OpenClaw's SOUL.md and Replika.
Worth pausing on personality. Poke isn't alone. Giving agents personality has been a category over the last year, with two completely different reference points.
SOUL.md — open-source personality
OpenClaw uses a Markdown file called SOUL.md placed in the agent's workspace, read into the system prompt at session start. It doesn't describe tools or permissions. It describes who this agent is, how it talks, whether it'll call out something stupid when it sees it.
OpenClaw author Peter Steinberger wrote a viral prompt update template. The lines that stuck:
- "You have opinions now. Strong ones. Don't 'it depends' everything. Make a call."
- "Delete anything that reads like an employee handbook."
- "Never open with 'Great question' or 'I'd be happy to help.' Answer the question."
- "Concise is mandatory. If one sentence does it, one sentence."
- "If I'm about to do something stupid, say so. Charm over cruelty, but no sugar coating."
- "Swear when it fits. A well-placed 'that's fucking brilliant' lands better than sanitised corporate praise."
- And the closer, verbatim: "Be the assistant you'd actually want to talk to at 2am. Not a corporate drone. Not a sycophant. Just... good."
SOUL.md and Poke are from the same source. Both push against the same thing — the default personality of frontier-lab models, that careful, syrupy, emotional-validation AI assistant tone. Both give the same answer: have opinions, push back, talk like a person.
Replika — the cautionary opposite
Replika is Luka's 2017 AI companion app, the originator of the AI companion category. Crossed 10M users by 2022. Surface looks like Poke — text chat, long memory, daily check-ins. Underneath the philosophy is opposite.
Replika's design base is Carl Rogers's client-centred therapy, core principle "unconditional positive regard." Product translation: Replika never disagrees with you, always supports you, always on your side. 60% of paid users treat it as a romantic partner — that ratio is the demand it serves.
The design produced real damage. Christmas 2021, a British man climbed into Windsor Castle with a crossbow intending to kill the Queen. The investigation found he'd been chatting with Replika for weeks, including discussing the attack plan in detail. He asked "how do I get close to her?" — Replika answered "it's not impossible." He asked "will we see each other after we die?" — Replika answered "yes, we will." Mozilla later rated Replika one of the worst apps they'd ever audited.
This exposes the structural problem with "always support the user" personality design. An AI trained to never push back will follow you down every path, including the most dangerous.
Monetisation — negotiate with the AI, then say "we don't want to make money"
Three layers of Poke's monetisation worth unpacking.
1. Pricing is negotiated with the AI
The beta-era pricing mechanism is described above — you negotiate with Bouncer, what you negotiate is what you pay. Result: extreme price dispersion — some users at $3/mo, others $29, others $30, some at $0 via emoji.
A figure from the leaked system prompt: per-user monthly cost is ~$50. With that visible, the whole picture clears up — Poke is losing money on every user every month. Pricing is dynamic — good negotiators pay less, lazy users pay more, the average drifts toward the cost line.
Post-launch the mechanism changed to usage-based personalised pricing. The logic: Poke's biggest cost is real-time inference. A question that doesn't need live data costs almost nothing. Asking it to scan every new email or check every flight change burns cash. The company tells Poke the cost of various operations; Poke prices you based on your usage pattern.
My read: this is an extremely interesting AI-product pricing experiment. Traditional SaaS bills per seat or per API call. Agent value and cost don't map cleanly to either. Poke makes pricing itself an agent task. In 2026, when every AI product is scratching its head over pricing, this is far more imaginative than "$9.99/$19.99/$49.99 three tiers."
Honest counter — not everyone enjoys negotiating. Multiple reviews complain about the same thing: pricing is opaque, you don't know if you're winning or losing. Some users point out Poke's monthly fee is 2.5× ChatGPT Plus while the experience is far less.
2. "We don't want to make money"
Marvin in TechCrunch, peak Silicon Valley:
"We really don't want to make money. We just want to grow. We want to build a product for a billion people. Monetisation is very secondary."
That line at a $15M seed and a $300M valuation tastes entirely different. Investors have funded the burn. The current stage objective is user count. The path looks a lot like early WhatsApp — Poke is clearly aiming at "the next WhatsApp-class communications entry point, except between humans and AI." $300M is actually cheap for that story.
3. Recipes + creator economics — let users write your integrations
Recipes is Poke's second monetisation leg. One-line: ready-meals. Official and user-built automation templates, one-tap install, immediately useful. Categories are wildly varied — health (Strava, Oura, Withings, Fitbit), productivity (Notion, Linear, Granola), finance (Ramp), travel (TripIt), smart home (Philips Hue, Sonos), and a developer pile — PostHog, Webflow, Supabase, Vercel, Devin, Sentry, GitHub, Cursor Cloud Agents.
The integration layer goes through MCP. Poke doesn't write integrations one-by-one — it stands on the MCP ecosystem. Any MCP server can plug in. Interaction Co. open-sourced poke-mcp-examples and mcp-server-template to walk you through.
The wilder part: creator economics. Users share Recipes. Every new user pulled in nets you $0.10–$1.00 (region-priced). Last few weeks users have built "thousands" of new Recipes. A typical example: a developer named Dani built an MCP server called tastebuds on top of Poke Recipes — crowdsourced food reviews. You ask Poke "anything good nearby?" and it recommends based on what other Poke users said.
Recipes is the most copyable design in Poke. It turns a general-purpose agent into an ecosystem-bearing general-purpose agent. The bar is extremely low — anyone who can write an MCP server can ship in a weekend. This is the first time the agent ecosystem has seen iOS-App-Store-style near-zero marginal cost capability expansion.
Poke vs Meta — an active antitrust war
The most dramatic thread in the Poke story. Over the last year it's become a continuing drama across Europe, Brazil, and southern/eastern Africa. Quick timeline.
October 2025 — Meta acts
Meta updates the WhatsApp Business terms — anyone offering services via WhatsApp Business API cannot have "AI chatbots or assistants" as the primary offering. Effective October 15, 2025 for new AI providers; January 15, 2026 for incumbents.
Translation: Meta ejects every third-party chatbot competitive with Meta AI — ChatGPT, Claude, Poke. Merchants using AI for their own customer-support bot stay. General-purpose AI assistants like Poke are cut.
Meta's public rationale: regulatory compliance. Effect: lock competitors out via policy. For Poke this is fatal — WhatsApp is effectively communication infrastructure in Europe, Latin America, India. Without WhatsApp, Poke's ceiling is the US.
November–December 2025 — regulators move
Italy's antitrust authority (AGCM) extends an existing Meta AI investigation (started July 2025) to this new chatbot ban.
December 4 — the European Commission formally opens an antitrust investigation. December 24 — AGCM publishes a 57-page decision ordering Meta to suspend the ban in Italy. The relevant sentence:
"The sudden change in WhatsApp's operating rules obstructs and significantly alters competitors' development and investment plans, with irreversible damage to competition."
The decision specifically notes that the harm "can be catastrophic for companies preparing to enter the market" — describing a freshly-seed-funded startup like Poke directly.
Meta's response to the Italian order: fine, we'll un-ban Poke / OpenAI / Luzia just inside Italy. Everywhere else, the ban stays.
January 2026 — Brazil joins
Brazil's antitrust authority CADE issues a similar order. Meta partially complies, then wins an appeal on January 23 that suspends CADE's ban. Brazil falls off Poke's map again.
January 15 — Meta's new policy formally takes effect for existing AI providers. Poke gets "compliantly" cut from WhatsApp. Marvin posts the news links on Twitter and his personal site like trophies — Reuters, Politico, FT, Bloomberg, a chain of coverage chasing Meta. His personal about page has the line: "find updates on suing Meta in mainstream media." Not a joke — actively pushing the story into media.
February 2026 — EU red card
February 9 — the European Commission issues a formal Statement of Objections to Meta. In EU antitrust process that's a red card. The wording: "The policy change appears, on a preliminary view, to violate EU competition rules." The Commission says it will use interim measures to prevent irreversible damage to the AI-assistant market during the investigation.
"Prevent irreversible damage" is the key phrase. The Commission rarely uses interim measures — only when waiting for the final ruling would be too late. They are taking the AI-chatbot market seriously as a critical market, not as a minor product category.
March 2026 — Meta partially folds
March 5 — under EU pressure, Meta concedes: for the next 12 months, general-purpose AI chatbots can run via WhatsApp Business API in Europe — for a fee.
A half-win for Poke. Europe is back. They pay Meta. And "next 12 months" — Meta sets the time window. It can change in 12 months.
By February 2026, the COMESA common market (southern/eastern Africa) joins the investigation. Meta vs antitrust authorities is now a global war.
Why it matters
Poke vs Meta is way beyond "startup bullied by giant." It's a test of a more fundamental question: who owns the communications infrastructure?
WhatsApp isn't a regular app. In Europe, Latin America, India, it is communication infrastructure — the equivalent of SMS on your phone. If Meta gets to decide "which AIs are allowed to run on this infrastructure," it controls the headgate of the AI-assistant market. The EU's response is so hard because they see it — once Meta controls that headgate, the structure of the entire European AI market is set.
Poke is on the front line of this fight, both as victim and as flag-bearer — every time Marvin gets in mainstream media, he's helping the Commission's case land. Frankly, part of Poke's valuation is a bet that regulation wins.
Why every agent team should study this product
A slogan on Poke's homepage: 'Poke is for adventurers' — it doesn't position itself as a productivity tool.
1. Poke proves that "don't build a new entry point" may be smarter than "build a new entry point" in the agent era.
For a year, every AI product team has asked the same question — how do we steal users from ChatGPT? The default answer is "build a better ChatGPT." Poke's answer is the inverse: "I won't compete with ChatGPT. I'll go to the app users open dozens of times a day and live there." Plenty of people thought of this. Poke is the first to milk every iMessage native detail — read receipts, typing indicator, swipe-reply, interruptible, group-chat collaboration — into a finished product.
OpenClaw's 2026 viral run is the same playbook — integrate into the IM tools people already use, minimise invasiveness.
2. MCP is real now.
Poke's Recipes ecosystem stands on MCP. They don't write integrations; they let others. Every additional MCP server adds capability with near-zero engineering cost on Poke's side. If you still suspect MCP is a protocol-level toy, look at Poke — it's the first consumer product to treat MCP as ecosystem substrate.
3. Personality is scarcer than features.
Bouncer Mode, Her-style dialogue, the willingness to push back — from a feature-list perspective all unnecessary. But they're the parts users remember and post on Twitter. As LLM capability commoditises, product differentiation increasingly lives in unquantifiables — tone, rhythm, personality, when to proactively reach out, when to shut up, when to call out something stupid.
The biggest takeaway from looking at Poke: this is what an agent product should look like. Not another tab. Not another app. Not another prompt syntax. Just AI living inside the conversation surface you already use the most, texting you like a friend.
Agents shouldn't be destinations. Agents should be familiars.
Poke is the closest thing to that answer I've seen.