Is Poke an OpenClaw for the remainder of us? That’s the concept coming from a brand new startup providing an AI agent that you would be able to entry by way of iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and, in some markets, WhatsApp.
The AI agent Poke launched publicly in March, permitting shoppers to entry a private assistant that may take motion on their behalf by means of a well-recognized interface. At the moment, Poke may help with on a regular basis wants, like day by day planning, managing your calendar, monitoring your well being and health, controlling your sensible residence, enhancing your images, and extra, all by way of textual content message.
Whereas you should still work together with a general-purpose AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude when you’ve questions or wish to do analysis, you’d flip to Poke whenever you wish to get one thing achieved rapidly, or whenever you wish to automate some job to save lots of you time.
For example, you could possibly ask Poke to warn you to particular emails (like these from your loved ones or your boss), or remind you within the morning if you’ll want to take an umbrella with you. It may provide help to monitor your well being and health targets, or let you understand the rating to final night time’s sport. Poke may ship day by day remedy reminders, or catch you up on the day’s information, and extra, since customers can write their very own automations in plain textual content after which share them with buddies.
Backed by Spark Capital, Common Catalyst, and different angels, the 10-person startup has extra just lately added one other $10 million to its coffers, on high of final 12 months’s $15 million seed spherical. It’s now valued at $300 million, post-money.
The instrument arrives as demand for agentic AI methods is spiking, main OpenAI to snap up OpenClaw’s creator, and Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang to warn that each firm wants its personal OpenClaw technique when asserting Nvidia’s enterprise-grade various.
However for these much less technically inclined, the prospect of getting to put in software program by means of the terminal, handle dependencies, and troubleshoot errors is daunting. Plus, methods like OpenClaw elevate safety considerations resulting from its deep system entry.
For many individuals, then, OpenClaw and different agentic methods nonetheless really feel out of attain. The group behind Poke needs to vary that.
Marvin von Hagen, co-founder of The Interplay Firm of California, the Palo Alto-based startup behind the brand new AI agent, tells Trendster that Poke emerged from watching how beta testers had been utilizing the corporate’s earlier product, an AI assistant for electronic mail, constructed round a 12 months in the past.
“What we seen there was that folks needed to make use of Poke for all the pieces… Despite the fact that it was solely meant for electronic mail, folks began asking Poke to remind them to take their remedy. They requested Poke about sports activities outcomes — ‘Hey Poke, inform me each morning if I want a jacket or not,’” explains von Hagen. “And at the moment, we didn’t have loads of this performance, however we seen how we wanted to change into general-purpose far more rapidly, as a result of folks identical to the character and the humanness of it a lot.”
The group then partially pivoted and targeted on making Poke extra helpful, proactive, and extra personable.
In contrast to OpenClaw, getting began with Poke is straightforward. You merely go to Poke.com, click on “Get Began,” and enter your telephone quantity. There’s no app to put in because the assistant operates over textual content messaging.
Underneath the hood, Poke turns to the AI mannequin that most closely fits the duty, whether or not that’s a mannequin from one of many large AI suppliers or an open supply mannequin.
“I believe that is additionally one in all our predominant strengths in the long term: that the majority of our opponents are simply large tech and labs which might be sure to a particular supplier. Like Meta AI will solely ever be capable to use Meta fashions, and ChatGPT will solely ever be capable to use OpenAI fashions,” von Hagen factors out.
To work over messaging platforms like iMessage, Poke additionally leverages Linq, an answer that allows AI assistants to reside inside messaging apps. The app can run by means of SMS and Telegram, too, however WhatsApp help is at present restricted as Meta barred different general-purpose chatbots final fall.
That would change, nonetheless. Regulators from the EU, Italy, and Brazil opened antitrust probes to struggle this determination, which has introduced Poke again to Brazil. It would hopefully additionally permit Poke to work on WhatsApp within the EU when Meta brings the prices down. (Meta has seen pushback over the excessive charges it’s charging — von Hagen says it’s a type of “malicious compliance” that he believes will quickly be addressed.)
At launch, Poke gives a wide range of “recipes” — or pre-made instruments that provide help to automate varied features of your life or work. These span classes like well being and wellness, productiveness, finance, scheduling, journey, residence, college, electronic mail, neighborhood, and, for individuals who are technical, developer instruments. Putting in them requires a click on of a button after which a regular authorization course of, if wanted.
These recipes are designed to work with apps and providers you already know, like Gmail, Google Calendar, Outlook, Notion, Linear, Granola, and others. There are well being and health “recipes” that work with Strava, Withings, Oura, Fitbit, and extra, in addition to those who work with sensible residence gadgets from corporations like Philips Hue and Sonos.
Builders utilizing Poke can even automate components of their workflow by way of integrations with instruments like PostHog, Webflow, Supabase, Vercel, Devin, Sentry, GitHub, Cursor Cloud Brokers, and others.
Poke’s safety mannequin is multi-layered and consists of common penetration testing, safety checks, varied instruments, and limiting permissions for each brokers and human staff. By default, the group can’t see something contained in the tokens, except the consumer manually opts to supply entry to a log file or analytics by flipping a swap of their settings to choose to share this info. (Trendster has not carried out its personal safety audit, to be clear.)
Over the previous couple of weeks, Poke’s customers have created hundreds extra recipes and automations, which the corporate plans so as to add to its recipes listing for discovery within the close to future. It’s additionally encouraging creators to construct these shareable recipes by providing to pay someplace between 10 cents and a greenback (based mostly on geography) for each consumer who indicators up for Poke by way of the recipe.
The fee to make use of Poke is surprisingly inexpensive: it’s free to start out, then pricing is versatile. In the course of the beta checks, customers truly needed to negotiate with the AI agent what worth they’d pay per thirty days, which ranged between $10-$30 — or so Poke informed us in response to this query.
Von Hagen says that, now, pricing relies on how the AI agent is getting used. In case you’re asking for issues that don’t require real-time knowledge, you could possibly in all probability use Poke without cost. What prices Poke cash is real-time inference, like automations that run on each incoming electronic mail or real-time flight check-ins. To set costs, the corporate gave Poke steering on how costly issues are, which permits it to find out customized pricing.
Whereas the corporate has managed to make Poke extra environment friendly to cut back prices, the objective proper now isn’t profitability, von Hagen notes.
“We actually don’t wish to earn cash, however we actually wish to develop. We wish to construct a product for a billion folks and monetization is de facto secondary,” he says. “The objective for the subsequent weeks and months now’s to deliver Poke into on a regular basis life.” To take action, it would look to creators and influencers to showcase how they’re utilizing Poke.
The corporate, co-founded by Felix Schlegel, isn’t sharing what number of prospects have signed up, past noting that the determine has 10x’ed over the previous couple of months. (Nonetheless, we did spot Poke on the high of Vercel’s AI Gateway leaderboard, for no matter that’s price.)
Along with its predominant institutional traders, Spark Capital and Common Catalyst, the startup has attracted the eye of a lot of angels, together with 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 additionally 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 a number of other others.
