Poke Raises $25M to Be Your AI Agent Inside iMessage
Every AI lab is building chat apps. Poke went the other direction — it put an AI agent inside the chat app you already use. Send a text to Poke via iMessage, SMS, Telegram, or WhatsApp, and it handles tasks on your behalf. Calendar management, health tracking, smart home control, photo editing, daily planning. No app to download, no interface to learn.
The 10-person Palo Alto startup just added $10M on top of its $15M seed round from General Catalyst and Spark Capital, pushing the valuation to $300M post-money. The angel list reads like a Silicon Valley all-star team: Stripe founders John and Patrick Collison, Logan and Jake Paul, Logan Kirkpatrick from DeepMind, Joanne Jang from OpenAI, and Cognition founders Scott Wu and Walden Yan.
The thesis is simple but contrarian: the best AI interface isn't a new app — it's the messaging thread you already check 100 times a day. Poke launched publicly in March and got covered by TechCrunch this week as a case study in bringing agents to everyday consumers, not just developers.
At $300M for a 10-person team, the valuation is aggressive. But the bet makes sense if you believe that the winning consumer agent isn't the one with the best model — it's the one with the lowest friction. And nothing has lower friction than a text message.
https://poke.com
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The 10-person Palo Alto startup just added $10M on top of its $15M seed round from General Catalyst and Spark Capital, pushing the valuation to $300M post-money. The angel list reads like a Silicon Valley all-star team: Stripe founders John and Patrick Collison, Logan and Jake Paul, Logan Kirkpatrick from DeepMind, Joanne Jang from OpenAI, and Cognition founders Scott Wu and Walden Yan.
The thesis is simple but contrarian: the best AI interface isn't a new app — it's the messaging thread you already check 100 times a day. Poke launched publicly in March and got covered by TechCrunch this week as a case study in bringing agents to everyday consumers, not just developers.
At $300M for a 10-person team, the valuation is aggressive. But the bet makes sense if you believe that the winning consumer agent isn't the one with the best model — it's the one with the lowest friction. And nothing has lower friction than a text message.
https://poke.com
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