AI agent Poke makes setting up automations as easy as sending a text

Is Poke an OpenClaw for the rest of us? That’s the idea coming from a new startup offering an AI agent that you can access via iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and, in some markets, WhatsApp.

The AI agent Poke launched publicly in March, allowing consumers to access a personal assistant that can take action on their behalf through a familiar interface. Today, Poke can help with everyday needs, like daily planning, managing your calendar, tracking your health and fitness, controlling your smart home, editing your photos, and more, all via text message.

While you may still interact with a general-purpose AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude when you have questions or want to do research, you’d turn to Poke when you want to get something done quickly, or when you want to automate some task to save you time.

For instance, you could ask Poke to alert you to specific emails (like those from your family or your boss), or remind you in the morning if you need to take an umbrella with you. It could help you track your health and fitness goals, or let you know the score to last night’s game. Poke could send daily medication reminders, or catch you up on the day’s news, and 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 angels, the 10-person startup has more 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, post-money.

The tool arrives as demand for agentic AI systems is spiking, leading OpenAI to snap up OpenClaw’s creator, and Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang to warn that every company needs its own OpenClaw strategy when announcing Nvidia’s enterprise-grade alternative.

But for those less technically inclined, the prospect of having to install software through the terminal, manage dependencies, and troubleshoot errors is daunting. Plus, systems like OpenClaw raise security concerns due to its deep system access.

For many people, then, OpenClaw and other agentic 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 behind the new AI agent, tells TechCrunch that Poke emerged from watching how beta testers were using the company’s earlier product, an AI assistant for email, built around a year ago.

“What we noticed there was that people wanted to use Poke for everything… Even though it was only meant for email, people started asking Poke to remind them to take their medication. They asked Poke about sports results — ‘Hey Poke, tell me every morning if I need a jacket or not,’” explains von Hagen. “And at that time, we didn’t have a lot of this functionality, but we noticed how we needed to become general-purpose much more quickly, because people just like the personality and the humanness of it so much.”

The team then partially pivoted and focused on making Poke more useful, proactive, and more personable.

Unlike OpenClaw, getting started with Poke is easy. You simply visit Poke.com, click “Get Started,” and enter your phone number. There’s no app to install as the assistant operates over 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 providers or an open source model.

“I think this is also one of our main strengths in the long run: that almost all of our competitors are just big tech and labs that are bound to a specific provider. 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 points out.

To work over messaging platforms like iMessage, Poke also leverages Linq, a solution that enables AI assistants to live within messaging apps. The app can run through SMS and Telegram, too, but WhatsApp support is currently limited as Meta barred other general-purpose chatbots last fall.

That could change, however. Regulators from the EU, Italy, and Brazil opened antitrust probes to fight this decision, which has brought Poke back to Brazil. It will hopefully also allow Poke to work on WhatsApp in the EU when Meta brings the costs down. (Meta has seen pushback over the high fees it’s charging — von Hagen says it’s a form of “malicious compliance” that he believes will soon be addressed.)

At launch, Poke offers a variety of “recipes” — or pre-made tools that help you automate various aspects of your life or work. These span categories like health and wellness, productivity, finance, scheduling, 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 needed.

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, and more, as well as those that work with smart home devices from companies like Philips Hue and Sonos.

Developers using Poke can also automate parts of their workflow via 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 limiting permissions for both agents and human employees. By default, the team can’t see anything inside the tokens, unless the user manually opts to provide access to a log file or analytics by flipping a switch in their settings to opt to share this information. (TechCrunch has not performed its own security audit, to be clear.)

Over the past couple of weeks, Poke’s users have created thousands more recipes and automations, which the company plans to add to its recipes directory for discovery in the near future. It’s also encouraging creators to build these shareable recipes by offering to pay somewhere between 10 cents and a dollar (based on geography) for every user who signs up for Poke via the recipe.

The cost to use Poke is surprisingly affordable: it’s free to start, then pricing is flexible. During the beta tests, users actually had to negotiate with the AI agent what price they’d pay per month, which ranged between $10-$30 — or so Poke told us in response to this question.

Von Hagen says that, now, pricing is based on how the AI agent is being used. If you’re asking for things that don’t require real-time data, you could 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-ins. To set prices, the company gave Poke guidance on how expensive things are, which allows it to determine personalized pricing.

While the company has managed to make Poke more efficient to reduce costs, the goal right now isn’t profitability, von Hagen notes.

“We really don’t want to make money, but we really want to grow. We want to build a product for a billion people and monetization is really secondary,” he says. “The goal for the next weeks and months now is to bring Poke into everyday life.” To do so, it will look to creators and influencers to showcase how they’re using Poke.

The company, co-founded by Felix Schlegel, isn’t sharing how many customers have signed up, beyond noting that the figure has 10x’ed over the past couple of months. (However, we did spot Poke at the top of Vercel’s AI Gateway leaderboard, for whatever that’s worth.)

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

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.