Palo Alto startup Interaction has raised $15 million, led by General Catalyst, to launch an AI assistant that lives fully inside iMessage and integrates seamlessly with your email, calendar, and web accounts. With participation from Village Global, Earlybird and key angel investors from companies like Stripe, Dropbox, and OpenAI, they have reached a valuation of over $100 million. Co-founded by Marvin Von Hagen and Felix Schlegel, Poke promises to redefine how people manage digital conversations by embedding true personal intelligence into the platforms millions already use.
Unlike many AI assistants that demand learning new interfaces and juggling multiple apps, Poke lives inside familiar messaging platforms such as iMessage, WhatsApp, and SMS. It goes beyond just messages, connecting seamlessly with your email and calendar to help you understand, draft, schedule, and follow up, all in one place. This approach aims to provide a communication partner that feels straightforward and helpful by remembering key details and assisting users as they go about their day.
According to the founders, “Existing AI products feel robotic, cold, and require users to change their habits around them. We want to bring more humanity into AI, and build a genuinely good product that blends into many millions of lives around the world”.
During the summer, more than 6,000 Silicon Valley insiders tested Poke, sending roughly 200,000 messages monthly within the platform. The assistant’s conversational design, intuitive one-tap responses, and human-like interactions consistently surprise and delight users, extending well beyond typical AI productivity tools.
The Minds Behind Poke
Co-founders Marvin Von Hagen and Felix Schlegel have combined their deep expertise in AI research, software engineering and large-scale design into Interaction’s vision. Before founding the startup, they made a name for themselves leading TUM Boring, a team that won SpaceX’s Not-a-Boring competition using a unique tunnel-boring machine.
Their engineering backgrounds include top institutions like Stanford, MIT, and Cambridge, alongside stints at Tesla and Apple. By surrounding themselves with engineers from elite companies like Jane Street, Robinhood, and Amazon, they created a passionate team equally enthusiastic as its users.
From Automation to Conversation
Although Poke started as an email automation tool, user feedback quickly changed that direction. The founders realised people didn’t want to learn complicated new interfaces or apps. Instead, they wanted a human-like assistant. Someone conversational, proactive, and interruptible, with the ability to handle tasks smoothly and naturally.
“Each new project remains an opportunity to reshape how humans and machines interact—a passion that has guided me from the family laptop to the world stage,” Schlegel said.
Features such as typing indicators, read receipts, and natural interruptions mimicked real conversations, making Poke feel genuine rather than robotic. This shift resulted in users replacing even popular AI tools like ChatGPT with Poke across diverse communication tasks. As a result, Poke expanded beyond email, growing organically where users led the way.
Moving Beyond Traditional AI
Poke’s success lies in its ability to merge multiple communication channels like email, chat, and calendar events into a single unified interface, simplifying how users manage their digital conversations. Underneath the friendly chat bubbles lies a sophisticated AI leveraging large language models, natural language understanding, and context retention to deliver timely, relevant, and personalised assistance.
Additionally, Poke is built with enterprise-level security standards like SOC 2 and CASA Tier 2 certification, ensuring that users’ privacy is respected without sacrificing functionality. This combination of smart assistance and strong privacy creates a trusted environment where users can confidently rely on their AI assistant.
The broader AI assistant landscape is also evolving rapidly with major players like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic continuously pushing boundaries in large language models and safety features. Yet, Interaction’s unique focus on embedding AI directly within familiar chat platforms and prioritising natural, personal interactions sets Poke apart from many assistants that often feel complex or impersonal.
