To us, Poke is OpenClaw, an idea from a new startup that offers an AI agent that can be accessed via iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and, in some markets, WhatsApp.
Poke, an AI agent, was made publicly available in March, giving consumers access to a personal assistant that can perform actions on their behalf through a familiar interface. Now, Poke can help you plan your day, manage your calendar, track your health and fitness, control your smart home, edit your photos, and more, all via text.
When you have a question or want to do some research, you can use a general-purpose AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude, but when you want to get something done quickly or want to automate a task to save time, you turn to Poke.
For example, you can ask Poke to notify you of certain emails (such as those from your family or your boss), or to remind you if you need to bring an umbrella in the morning. It helps you track your health and fitness goals, or tells you the score of last night’s game. Poke allows users to create their own automations in plain text and share them with friends, so they can send daily medication reminders, tell them about the day’s news, and more.
Backed by Spark Capital, General Catalyst, and other angels, the 10-person startup just recently added another $10 million to its coffers on top of last year’s $15 million seed round. Its current value is $300 million post-money.
The tool comes amid a surge in demand for agent AI systems, OpenAI nabs OpenClaw developers, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warning that every company needs its own OpenClaw strategy when announcing Nvidia’s enterprise-grade replacement.
But for those who aren’t very tech-savvy, having to install software, manage dependencies, and troubleshoot errors through a terminal can be daunting. Additionally, systems like OpenClaw raise security concerns due to their deep access to the system.
Therefore, for many people, OpenClaw and other agent systems still feel out of reach. The team behind Poke wants to change that.
Marvin von Hagen, co-founder of The Interaction Company of California, the Palo Alto-based startup that developed the new AI agent, told TechCrunch that Poke was born from observing how beta testers were using the company’s initial product, an AI assistant for email, developed about a year ago.
“So what we realized was that people wanted to use Poke for everything… Even though it was only for email, people started asking Poke to remind them to take their medication. They asked Poke about their sports results. ‘Hey, Poke, tell me every morning if you need a jacket,’ von Hagen explains. “And at the time, we didn’t have a lot of this functionality, but people loved the individuality and humanness of it so much that we realized we needed to make it more generalized sooner.”
The team then partially pivoted and focused on making Poke more useful, proactive, and more personal.
Unlike OpenClaw, getting started with Poke is easy. Simply visit Poke.com, click Get Started and enter your phone number. Assistant works via text messages, so you don’t need to install an app.
Under the hood, Poke leverages the best AI model for the task, whether it’s from a major AI provider or an open source model.
“I think this is also one of our main strengths in the long run, where almost all of our competitors are just big tech companies and research institutes that are tied to a particular provider. Just as Meta AI will continue to be able to use only Meta models, ChatGPT will also be able to use only OpenAI models,” von Hagen points out.
To work on messaging platforms like iMessage, Poke also leverages Linq, a solution that allows AI assistants to work within messaging apps. The app can also run on SMS and Telegram, but support for WhatsApp is currently limited after Meta banned other general-purpose chatbots last fall.
However, things may change. Regulators in the EU, Italy and Brazil launched antitrust investigations to challenge the decision, and Poke was returned to Brazil. It is hoped that if Meta brings costs down, it will also be possible for Poke to work on WhatsApp within the EU. (Meta has received backlash over its high fees; von Hagen said he believes this is a form of “bad compliance” and will be addressed soon.)
At launch, Poke will offer a variety of “recipes,” or ready-made tools that help you automate different aspects of your life and work. These span categories such as health and wellness, productivity, finances, scheduling, travel, home, school, email, community, and even developer tools for techies. To install them, you need to click a button and go through the standard authentication process if necessary.
These recipes are designed to work with the apps and services you already know, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, Notion, Linear, and Granola. There are health and fitness “recipes” that work with Strava, Withings, Oura, Fitbit, and more, as well as smart home devices from companies like Philips Hue and Sonos.
Developers using Poke can also automate parts of their workflow through integrations with tools such as PostHog, Webflow, Supabase, Vercel, Devin, Sentry, GitHub, and Cursor Cloud Agents.
Poke’s security model is multi-layered and includes regular penetration testing, security checks, a variety of tools, and privilege restrictions for both agents and employees. By default, your team can’t see anything inside your token unless you toggle a switch in settings to allow access to your log files or analytics and manually choose to share this information. (To be clear, TechCrunch does not conduct its own security audits.)
Over the past few weeks, Poke users have created thousands more recipes and automations. The company plans to add them to the recipe directory for discovery in the near future. We also encourage creators to create these shareable recipes by offering to pay between 10 cents and $1 (based on region) for each user who signs up for Poke via a recipe.
Poke is surprisingly affordable. It’s free initially, and pricing is flexible thereafter. During beta testing, users actually had to negotiate a monthly fee with the AI agent. Prices ranged from $10 to $30. Mr. Poke answered this question as follows.
Von Hagen said pricing is currently based on how the AI agent is used. If you’re looking for something that doesn’t require real-time data, you can probably use Poke for free. What Poke money costs is real-time inference, such as the automation that runs on every incoming email or real-time flight check-in. To set prices, the company provided Poke with guidance on the price of its products, which allowed it to determine personalized prices.
While the company has been able to make Poke more efficient to reduce costs, von Hagen points out that profitability is not the goal right now.
“We don’t really want to make money, but we really want to grow. We want to create a product for a billion people, but monetization is really secondary,” he says. “Our goal for the coming weeks and months is to incorporate Poke into our daily lives.” To do that, we’re asking creators and influencers to share how they’re using Poke.
The company, co-founded by Felix Schlegel, isn’t disclosing anything other than that its number of subscribers has increased tenfold in the past few months. (For what it’s worth, though, we did see Poke at the top of Vercel’s AI Gateway leaderboard.)
In addition to major institutional investors Spark Capital and General Catalyst, the startup has attracted the attention of a number of angels, including John and Patrick Collison (founders of Stripe), Jake and Logan Paul, Logan Kirlpatrick of DeepMind, Joanne Jang of OpenAI, Scott Wu and Walden Yan (founders of Cognition).
The members included Vercel co-founder Guillermo Rauch, PayPal co-founder Ken Howery, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, Mercor co-founder Brendan Foody, Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf, Flapping Airplanes co-founder Ben Spector, and several others.
