Today, Interaction, a Palo Alto startup, is unveiling Poke, an AI assistant that lives fully inside iMessage and integrates seamlessly with your email, calendar, and web accounts. The company aims to solve a major problem faced by users of existing AI assistants: a lack of real context about the user’s day-to-day life.
Important tasks, such as upcoming invoices, flight changes, or meeting reschedules, often go unnoticed or require juggling multiple apps and interfaces. Poke simplifies this by sending actionable, friendly nudges within a single, familiar conversation thread, allowing users to handle tasks quickly without needing to switch between apps.
Today, the company raised $15 million in seed funding, led by General Catalyst, at a $100 million valuation, with participation from Village Global, Earlybird, and key angel investors from companies like Stripe, Dropbox, and OpenAI, to scale its technology and user base.
Interaction’s co-founders, Marvin von Hagen and Felix Schlegel, build on deep engineering and research roots from Tesla, Apple, Stanford, and MIT. Their previous venture, TUM Boring, won Elon Musk’s Not-a-Boring competition in 2021 after building a massive tunnelling machine.
Now their focus is creating a digital assistant that doesn’t require constant user training or app-hopping and is built with privacy guardrails front and centre.
Poke stands out with its approach of delivering short, conversational text bubbles and one-tap responses that act on your behalf, whether drafting replies, paying invoices, rescheduling meetings, or booking travel. Behind the scenes, Poke leverages top-tier security standards, including SOC 2 and CASA Tier 2, to ensure privacy and protection.
During the summer, more than 6,000 Silicon Valley insiders tested Poke, sending roughly 200,000 messages monthly within the platform.
The startup plans to expand access and enhance the assistant’s capabilities, leveraging the chat interface that millions already use daily.
