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I am Poke OpenClaw for all of us? That’s the idea behind a new startup offering an AI assistant that you can access via iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and, in some markets, WhatsApp.
AI Poke Assistant he started public in March, allowing consumers to find a personal agent who can act on their behalf using a familiar interface. Today, Poke it can help you with daily needs, such as daily planning, managing your calendar, monitoring your health and fitness, controlling your smart home, editing your photos, etc., all through text messages.
While you can still chat with AI-based chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude when you have questions or want to investigate, you can turn to Poke when you need to do something quickly, or when you want to switch tasks to save time.
For example, you can ask Poke to alert you to certain emails (such as from your family or your boss), or to remind you in the morning if you need to bring an umbrella. It can help you track your health and fitness goals, or let you know about last night’s game. Poke can send daily medication reminders, or get you the news of the day, and much more, as users can write their notes in plain text and share them with their friends.
With the help of Spark Capital, General Catalyst, and other angels, the 10-person startup has recently added $10 million to its funds, on top of last year’s $15 million seed. Now it’s worth $300 million, post-money.
This tool comes at a time when the demand for AI systems is increasing, leading OpenAI to download the OpenClaw developerand Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to warn that Each company needs its own OpenClaw solution announcing Nvidia’s alternative business strategy.
But for those without technical skills, the prospect of running programs through the terminal, managing dependencies, and managing errors is daunting. In addition, systems like OpenClaw raise security concerns due to their deep technical capabilities.
For many people, then, OpenClaw and other traditional systems still feel out of reach. The team behind Poke wants to change that.
Marvin von Hagenco-founder of The Interaction Company of Californiathe Palo Alto startup behind the new AI assistant, tells TechCrunch that Poke came out of seeing how beta testers used the company’s first product, an AI assistant for email, built about a year ago.
“What we saw there was that people wanted to use Poke for everything… Even though it was only done by email, people started asking Poke to remind them to take their medicine. They asked Poke about the results of the game – ‘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 functionality, but we saw how we needed to become common goals very quickly, because people like personality and personality.”
The team put a little effort into making Poke useful, stable, and visually appealing.
Unlike OpenClaw, getting started with Poke is easy. You just visit Poke.com, click “Get Started,” and enter your phone number. There is no software to install as the agent is using text messages.
Under the hood, Poke turns to the type of AI that best fits the task, whether it’s an example from one of the main AI providers or open source.
“I think that this is also one of our greatest strengths in the long run: that almost all of our competitors are large technologies and labs that are tied to another provider. Like Meta AI will be able to use Meta models, and ChatGPT will be able to use OpenAI models,” von Hagen explains.
To work on platforms like iMessage, Poke and support Linqa solution that enables AI agents to be embedded within messaging apps. The app can run through SMS and Telegram, too, but WhatsApp support is currently limited Meta has banned some random chatbots from time to time last fall.
This may change, however. Controllers from the EUItaly, and Brazil opened an antitrust investigation to fight this decision, which has brought Poke to Brazil. Hopefully it will also allow Poke to work on WhatsApp in the EU Meta once the price drops. (Meta has seen a chargeback — von Hagen says it’s a type of “bad tracking” that he hopes will soon be phased out.)
At launch, Poke offers a variety of “recipes” – or pre-made tools that help you improve different aspects of your life or career. These categories include health and wellness, productivity, money, schedule, travel, home, school, email, community, and, for the more technical, software tools. Setting it up requires clicking a button and then a formal approval process, if needed.
These recipes are designed to work with programs and services you already know, such as 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 who use Poke can also customize their workflow using tools like PostHog, Webflow, Supabase, Vercel, Devin, Sentry, GitHub, Cursor Cloud Agents, and others.
Poke’s security model is multifaceted and includes frequent penetration testing, security checks, various tools, and limited permissions for agents and employees. By default, the group cannot see anything inside the symbols, unless the user chooses to grant access to the log file or analytics by turning the settings in their preferences to choose to share this information. (TechCrunch did not conduct its own security research, to be clear.)
In the past few weeks, Poke users they have developed thousands of other recipes, which the company plans to add to its recipes soon. It also encourages creators to create shareable recipes by offering between 10 cents and one dollar (depending on geography) to each Poke user through the recipe.
The cost of using Poke is surprisingly cheap: it’s free to start, so prices are flexible. During the beta test, users have to discuss with the AI ​​assistant the price they pay per month, which is between $10-$30 – or Poke told us in response to this question.
Von Hagen says that, now, the value proposition is based on how the AI ​​assistant is being used. If you’re asking for things that don’t require virtual reality, you can use Poke for free. What makes Poke money is real-time simulations, like automated processes that run on every incoming email or airline check-in in real time. To set prices, the company issued Poke pricing guidelines, allowing it to identify individual prices.
While the company has been able to make Poke more efficient to cut costs, the goal right now is not profit, von Hagen wrote.
“We don’t really want to make money, but we really want to grow. We want to make a business to a billion people and making money is secondary,” he says. “The goal for the coming weeks and months is to bring Poke into everyday life.” To do this, it will look to developers and promoters to show how they are using Poke.
The company, founded by Felix Schlegeldoes not share the number of registered customers, other than to note that the number has been 10x’ed in the last few months. (However, we saw Poke above Vercel’s AI Gateway leaderboard for whatever it’s worth.)
In addition to its main shareholders, Spark Capital and General Catalyst, the startup has attracted the attention of several angels, including John and Patrick Collison (founders of Stripe), Jake and Logan Paul, Logan Kirlpatrick of DeepMind, Joanne Jang of OpenAI, and 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.