Poke makes using AI agents as easy as sending a text message | TechCrunch

East Push an OpenClaw for the rest of us? It’s the idea of ​​a new startup offering an AI agent that you can access via iMessage, SMS, Telegram and, in some markets, WhatsApp.

AI Agent Poke spear publicly in March, giving consumers access to a personal assistant capable of acting on their behalf through a familiar interface. Today, Poke can help you with everyday needs, like daily planning, managing your calendar, tracking your health and fitness, controlling your smart home, editing your photos, and much more, all via SMS.

While you can still interact with a general-purpose AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude when you have questions or want to do research, you’ll turn to Poke when you want to do something quickly or when you want to automate certain tasks to save you time.

For example, you can ask Poke to alert you to specific emails (like those from your family or your boss), or to remind you in the morning if you need to take an umbrella with you. This could help you track your health and fitness goals, or tell you the score of last night’s game. Poke could send daily medication reminders, or update you on the day’s news, and much more, since users can write their own automations in plain text and then share them with friends.

Backed by Spark Capital, General Catalyst and other angel investors, the 10-person startup most recently added another $10 million to its coffers, on top of last year’s $15 million seed round. It’s now valued at $300 million, after cash.

The tool comes as demand for agentic AI systems increases, leading OpenAI to take the creator of OpenClawand Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to warn that every business needs its own OpenClaw strategy when announcing Nvidia’s enterprise-grade alternative.

But for those who are less technically inclined, the prospect of having to install software via the terminal, manage dependencies, and resolve errors is daunting. Additionally, systems like OpenClaw raise security concerns due to their deep system access.

For many people, therefore, OpenClaw and other agentic systems still seem out of reach. The team behind Poke wants to change that.

Marvin von Hagenco-founder of The Interaction Society of Californiathe Palo Alto-based startup behind the new AI agent, tells TechCrunch that Poke emerged from observing how beta testers used the company’s previous product, an AI assistant for email, created about a year ago.

“What we noticed there was that people wanted to use Poke for everything… Even though it was just for email, people started asking Poke to remind them to take their meds. They asked Poke about sports scores – ‘Hey Poke, tell me every morning if I need a jacket or not,’ says von Hagen. “And at that time we didn’t have a lot of those features, but we noticed how general we had to become a lot faster, because people love the personality and the human side of this product so much.”

The team then partially pivoted and focused on making Poke more useful, more proactive, and more user-friendly.

Unlike OpenClaw, getting started with Poke is simple. Simply visit Poke.com, click “Get Started” and enter your phone number. There are no apps to install because the assistant works via text messaging.

Under the hood, Poke turns to the AI ​​model that best fits the task, whether that’s a model from one of the big AI vendors or an open source model.

“I think this is also one of our main strengths in the long term: that almost all of our competitors are just big techs and labs tied to a specific vendor. Like Meta AI will only ever be able to use Meta models, and ChatGPT will only ever be able to use OpenAI models,” von Hagen emphasizes.

To work on messaging platforms like iMessage, Poke also exploits Linqa solution that allows AI assistants to live within messaging applications. The app can also work via SMS and Telegram, but support for WhatsApp is currently limited because Meta banned other general-purpose chatbots last fall.

However, this could change. EU regulatorsItaly and Brazil opening of antitrust investigations to fight this decision, which brought Poke back to Brazil. We hope this will also allow Poke to work on WhatsApp in the EU when Meta reduces costs. (Meta has faced pushback over the high fees it charges — von Hagen says it’s a form of “malicious compliance” that he says will soon be resolved.)

At launch, Poke offers a variety of “recipes” – or pre-built tools that help you automate various aspects of your life or work. These cover categories like health and wellness, productivity, finances, planning, travel, home, school, email, community, and, for those who are technical, developer tools. Installing them requires a click of a button and then a standard authorization process, if necessary.

These recipes are designed to work with apps and services you already know, like Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, Notion, Linear, Granola and others. There are health and fitness “recipes” that work with Strava, Withings, Oura, Fitbit, etc., as well as ones that work with smart home devices from companies like Philips Hue and Sonos.

Developers using Poke can also automate parts of their workflow through integrations with tools like PostHog, Webflow, Supabase, Vercel, Devin, Sentry, GitHub, Cursor Cloud Agents and others.

Poke’s security model is multi-layered and includes regular penetration testing, security checks, various tools, and limited permissions for human agents and employees. By default, the team cannot see anything inside the tokens, unless the user manually chooses to provide access to a log file or analytics by flipping a switch in their settings to choose to share this information. (TechCrunch did not conduct its own security audit, to be clear.)

Over the past two weeks, Poke users have created thousands of other recipes and automations, which the company plans to add to its recipe repertoire for discovery in the near future. It also encourages creators to create these shareable recipes by offering to pay between 10 cents and a dollar (depending on geography) for each user who signs up for Poke via the recipe.

The cost of using Poke is surprisingly affordable: it’s free to start, and then the pricing is flexible. During beta testing, users had to negotiate with the AI ​​agent the price they would pay per month, which ranged between $10 and $30 – at least that’s what Poke told us in response to this question.

Von Hagen says that now pricing is based on how the AI ​​agent is used. If you’re asking for things that don’t require real-time data, you can probably use Poke for free. What costs Poke money is real-time inference, like automations that run on every incoming email or real-time flight check-in. To set prices, the company gave Poke input on product prices, which allows it to determine personalized prices.

Although the company has managed to make Poke more efficient to reduce costs, the current goal is not profitability, notes von Hagen.

“We really don’t want to make money, but we really want to grow. We want to create a product for a billion people and monetization is really secondary,” he says. “The goal for the coming weeks and months is now to introduce Poke into everyday life. » To do this, he will reach out to creators and influencers to show how they use Poke.

The company, co-founded by Felix Schlegeldoes not share the number of customers who have signed up, only noting that this figure has multiplied by 10 in the last two months. (However, we spotted Poke at the top of Vercel’s AI Gateway rankingfor what it’s worth.)

In addition to its main institutional investors, Spark Capital and General Catalyst, the startup has attracted the attention of numerous angel investors, including John and Patrick Collison (founders of Stripe), Jake and Logan Paul, Logan Kilpatrick of DeepMind, Joanne Jang from OpenAI, as well as Scott Wu and Walden Yan (founders of Cognition).

It also 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.