Is Poke an OpenClaw for the remainder of us? That’s the concept coming from a brand new startup providing an AI agent you could entry by way of iMessage, SMS, Telegram, and, in some markets, WhatsApp.
The AI agent Poke launched publicly in March, permitting customers to entry a private assistant that may take motion on their behalf by a well-recognized interface. At the moment, Poke may also help with on a regular basis wants, like day by day planning, managing your calendar, monitoring your well being and health, controlling your sensible dwelling, modifying your pictures, 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 could have questions or need to do analysis, you’d flip to Poke once you need to get one thing carried out rapidly, or once you need to automate some activity to save lots of you time.
As an illustration, you may ask Poke to warn you to particular emails (like these from your loved ones or your boss), or remind you within the morning if it’s worthwhile to take an umbrella with you. It may show you how to monitor your well being and health objectives, or let you recognize the rating to final evening’s recreation. 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 associates.
Backed by Spark Capital, Normal Catalyst, and different angels, the 10-person startup has extra not too long ago added one other $10 million to its coffers, on prime 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 techniques 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 saying Nvidia’s enterprise-grade different.
However for these much less technically inclined, the prospect of getting to put in software program by the terminal, handle dependencies, and troubleshoot errors is daunting. Plus, techniques like OpenClaw increase safety issues as a result of its deep system entry.
For many individuals, then, OpenClaw and different agentic techniques nonetheless really feel out of attain. The group behind Poke needs to alter that.
Marvin von Hagen, co-founder of The Interaction Company of California, the Palo Alto-based startup behind the brand new AI agent, tells TechCrunch that Poke emerged from watching how beta testers have been utilizing the corporate’s earlier product, an AI assistant for e-mail, constructed round a 12 months in the past.
“What we observed there was that folks needed to make use of Poke for the whole lot… Although it was solely meant for e-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 numerous this performance, however we observed how we wanted to turn into general-purpose way more rapidly, as a result of folks similar 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.
Not like OpenClaw, getting began with Poke is simple. 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.
Below 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 massive AI suppliers or an open supply mannequin.
“I feel that is additionally considered one of our foremost strengths in the long term: that the majority of our opponents are simply massive tech and labs which might be certain to a selected 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 permits AI assistants to reside inside messaging apps. The app can run by SMS and Telegram, too, however WhatsApp assist is presently restricted as Meta barred different general-purpose chatbots final fall.
That would change, nevertheless. Regulators from the EU, Italy, and Brazil opened antitrust probes to combat this choice, which has introduced Poke again to Brazil. It is going to hopefully additionally enable 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 quite a lot of “recipes” — or pre-made instruments that show you how to automate numerous elements of your life or work. These span classes like well being and wellness, productiveness, finance, scheduling, journey, dwelling, college, e-mail, group, 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 people who work with sensible dwelling gadgets from corporations like Philips Hue and Sonos.
Builders utilizing Poke can even automate elements 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, numerous instruments, and limiting permissions for each brokers and human workers. By default, the group can’t see something contained in the tokens, until the consumer manually opts to offer entry to a log file or analytics by flipping a change of their settings to decide to share this info. (TechCrunch has not carried out its personal safety audit, to be clear.)
Over the previous couple of weeks, Poke’s users have created 1000’s 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 price to make use of Poke is surprisingly inexpensive: it’s free to start out, then pricing is versatile. Throughout the beta exams, customers really needed to negotiate with the AI agent what worth they’d pay monthly, which ranged between $10-$30 — or so Poke instructed us in response to this query.
Von Hagen says that, now, pricing is predicated on how the AI agent is getting used. In the event you’re asking for issues that don’t require real-time information, you may most likely use Poke without spending a dime. What prices Poke cash is real-time inference, like automations that run on each incoming e-mail or real-time flight check-ins. To set costs, the corporate gave Poke steerage on how costly issues are, which permits it to find out personalised pricing.
Whereas the corporate has managed to make Poke extra environment friendly to scale back prices, the purpose proper now isn’t profitability, von Hagen notes.
“We actually don’t need to become profitable, however we actually need to develop. We need to construct a product for a billion folks and monetization is actually secondary,” he says. “The purpose for the subsequent weeks and months now’s to convey Poke into on a regular basis life.” To take action, it should 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. (Nevertheless, we did spot Poke on the prime of Vercel’s AI Gateway leaderboard, for no matter that’s value.)
Along with its foremost institutional traders, Spark Capital and Normal Catalyst, the startup has attracted the eye of quite a few 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.
