Today a new AI lab, The Interaction Company of California, unveiled Poke.com a new AI assistant that lives in iMessage.
The company is betting that most people don’t want another app. They want help inside the apps they already use all day. Poke claims to connect to your email, calendar, and files, then acts on your behalf through short text threads, drafting replies, rescheduling meetings, paying invoices, booking travel, and more. Interaction also announced a $15 million seed round led by General Catalyst, with Village Global, Earlybird VC, and angel backers including founders from Dropbox, Vercel, and Google, OpenAI, and others. The round values the company at $100 million. The company released a video you can watch here.
App overload and Poke’s iMessage solution
Most AI helpers live in their own apps and know little about your real life. They don’t see the emails, texts, receipts, and calendar changes that drive your day. So answers come without context, and actions stop at suggestions. You end up copy-pasting between apps, juggling logins, and missing time-sensitive tasks.
Poke runs as a normal conversation in your existing messaging app. It watches for actionable signals across connected accounts. It then pings you with a concise message and a one-tap action. Example: “Your 3pm moved to tomorrow, confirm the new time?” Or: “Invoice from ACME due Friday, pay now?” You can type back like you would to a colleague and keep going.
Early data is promising. In a closed beta over the summer, thousands of founders, VCs, and operators from companies such as Dropbox, Google, OpenAI, General Catalyst, Cognition, Figma, Anthropic, and Founders Fund exchanged about 200,000 texts per month with Poke. Across the first few thousand users, Interaction says they logged 750,000+ messages and saw near-perfect retention.
“Users don’t want another app. They want to text an AI the same way they text their partner, friends, and colleagues,” says Marvin von Hagen, co-founder and CEO. “Poke provides this experience done right, short messages, one-tap actions, built with privacy as a foundation.”
Large market with big players
Big tech is racing to make assistants more helpful. Many startups promise “agent” workflows. Poke takes a simpler path: meet the user in text, detect the next task, and complete it with one tap. If Interaction can keep actions fast, accurate, and safe, the messaging surface could lower friction for mainstream users who won’t adopt new interfaces.
“Sometimes you discover a user experience that feels like uncovering a hidden secret,” said Yuri Sagalov, Managing Director at General Catalyst. “Marvin and Felix did just that. The experience of interacting with Poke over iMessage is magical. It’s like having your best assistant be with you in the interface you already use every single day. It surfaces important emails, performs actions on your behalf, and continually delights and surprises you in the help it provides.”.
The company says it follows SOC 2 Type II and CASA Tier 2 standards and runs regular third-party penetration tests. Access to email, calendars, and files is permission-based, and actions require explicit approval in-thread. Pricing “varies by user needs,” according to Interaction.
Experienced founding team
Von Hagen and co-founder Felix Schlegel met at a middle school hackathon in Germany. They later co-founded TUM Boring, leading a 65-person team that built a 12-meter, 22-ton tunneling machine to win Elon Musk’s 2021 Not-a-Boring Competition. Von Hagen has worked across engineering and AI safety, co-authoring two papers during time at MIT and helping raise awareness of prompt injection risks. His interviews have appeared in TIME, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Schlegel started coding young, attended WWDC as a high-schooler, and did research at TUM, Cambridge, and Stanford. The broader team includes alumni of Jane Street, Citadel, Apple, and Tesla.
What’s next
If Poke keeps the interaction pattern tight, short prompts, clear choices, immediate results, it could stand out as a practical assistant for busy professionals who live in text. The funding gives Interaction room to hire, harden security, and build deeper links into the tools that run modern work and life.
Bottom line: Poke is not trying to replace your inbox app or your calendar app. It’s trying to live in your message thread and make the next step obvious, and doable, without leaving the chat. If the company sustains its early retention and keeps trust high, the messaging-first model could be a simple way to make AI useful to more people, more often. Sign up now at https://poke.com/.
