Is Poke OpenClaw for all of us? This is the idea from a new startup that offers AI agents that can be accessed through iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and, in some markets, WhatsApp.
AI agent Poke launched publicly last March, giving consumers access to a personal assistant that can take actions on their behalf through a familiar interface. Today, Poke can assist with all your everyday needs, such as daily planning, calendar management, health and fitness tracking, smart home control, photo editing, and more, all via text messaging.
When you have a question or want to do some research, you can interact with a general-purpose AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude, but if you want to get a task done quickly or want to automate some tasks to save time, you’ll use Poke.
For example, you can ask Poke to notify you about certain emails (such as emails from your family or boss), or if you need to take your umbrella with you in the morning. It can help you track your health and fitness goals or tell you the score of last night’s game. Poke allows users to write their own automations in plain text and then share them with friends, so they can send daily medication reminders, catch up on the day’s news, and more.
Backed by Spark Capital, General Catalyst and other angels, the 10-person startup recently added another $10 million to its coffers, adding to its $15 million seed round last year. It is now valued at $300 million.
The tool comes as demand for agent AI systems surges, with OpenAI snatching up the creator of OpenClaw and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warning that every company needs its own OpenClaw strategy when announcing an enterprise-grade alternative to Nvidia.
However, for the less technically inclined, having to install software, manage dependencies, and troubleshoot errors through the terminal can be a challenge. Additionally, systems like OpenClaw pose security concerns due to deep system access.
For many people, OpenClaw and other agent systems still feel inaccessible. The Poke team wants to change that.
Marvin von Hagen, co-founder of The Interaction Company of California, a Palo Alto-based startup developing the new AI agent, told TechCrunch that Poke was born out of observing how beta testers were using the company’s previous product, an AI assistant for email, built about a year ago.
“What we found 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 medicine. They asked Poke about their sports results. ‘Hey Poke, tell me every morning if you need a jacket,'” explains von Hagen. “We didn’t have a lot of this feature at the time, but people loved the individuality and humanity of it so much that we realized we needed to make it commoditized much sooner.”
The team then partially pivoted and focused on making Poke more useful, active, and personable.
Unlike OpenClaw, getting started with Poke is easy. Simply visit Poke.com, click “Get Started” and enter your phone number. The assistant works via text message, so there are no apps to install.
Internally, Poke selects the best AI model for the job, whether a model from a large AI provider or an open source model.
“In the long term, I think this is one of our main strengths: almost all of our competitors are large technologies and labs tied to specific providers. Meta AI will only be able to use Meta models, and ChatGPT will only be able to use OpenAI models,” points out von Hagen.
To work with messaging platforms like iMessage, Poke also leverages Linq, a solution that allows AI assistants to operate within messaging apps. The app can also run via SMS and Telegram, but WhatsApp support is currently limited as Meta banned other universal chatbots last fall.
But that may change. Regulators in the EU, Italy and Brazil launched antitrust investigations in response to this decision, which brought Poke back to Brazil. Hopefully, if Meta lowers the cost, Poke will be able to work on WhatsApp in the EU. (Meta has faced backlash over its high fees, which von Hagen says is a form of “malicious compliance” that he believes will soon be addressed.)
At launch, Poke will offer a variety of “recipes” or pre-made tools to help you automate different aspects of your life or work. These categories include categories such as Health & Wellness, Productivity, Finance, Scheduling, Travel, Home, School, Email, Community, and Technical Developer Tools. Installing it requires you to click a button and then go through the standard authentication process if required.
These recipes are designed to work with the apps and services you already know, like Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, Notion, Linear, Granola, and more. 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, Cursor Cloud Agents, and more.
Poke’s security model is multi-layered and includes regular penetration testing, security scans, a variety of tools, and privilege restrictions for both agents and employees. By default, your team won’t be able to see anything inside the token unless you manually choose to provide access to log files or analytics by toggling a switch in Settings to choose to share this information. (TechCrunch has not conducted its own security audit.)
Over the past few weeks, Poke’s users have created thousands more recipes and automations, and the company plans to add them to its searchable recipe directory in the near future. We’re also encouraging creators to build shareable recipes by offering to pay anywhere from 10 cents to $1 (depending on your region) to anyone who joins Poke with a recipe.
The cost of using Poke is surprisingly affordable. It’s free to get started, and pricing is flexible. During beta testing, users actually had to negotiate with the AI agent the price they would pay each month (ranging from $10 to $30). Or so Poke said in response to this question.
Von Hagen says the price is now determined by how the AI agent is used. If you require something that doesn’t require real-time data, Poke is free to use. The cost of Poke Money is real-time inference, such as automation that runs on every incoming email or real-time flight check-in. To set prices, the company gave Poke guidance on how expensive items should be, allowing it to determine personalized prices.
The company has cut costs by making Poke more efficient, but its current goal is not profitability, von Hagen says.
“We don’t really 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. “Our goal over the coming weeks and months is to introduce Poke into our daily lives.” To that end, we’ll show you how creators and influencers are using Poke.
The company, co-founded by Felix Schlegel, doesn’t share how many customers have signed up, other than to note that that number has increased tenfold in the past few months. (But we found Poke at the top of Vercel’s AI Gateway leaderboard, so it’s worth it.)
In addition to major institutional investors Spark Capital and General Catalyst, the startup has attracted the attention of numerous angels, including John and Patrick Collison (founders of Stripe), Jake and Logan Paul, Logan Kilpatrick of DeepMind, Joanne Zhang of OpenAI, and Scott Wu and Walden Yan (founders of Cognition).
Also included were 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, and Flapping Airplanes co-founder Ben Spector.
