Is Poke an OpenClaw for the remainder of us? That’s the thought coming from a new startup providing an AI agent that you may entry through 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 a acquainted interface. Today, Poke might 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, enhancing your images, and extra, all through text message.
While you should still work together with a general-purpose AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude when you might have questions or wish to do analysis, you’d flip to Poke if you wish to get one thing accomplished rapidly, or if you wish to automate some process to save lots of you time.
For occasion, you may ask Poke to provide you with a warning to particular emails (like these from your loved ones or your boss), or remind you within the morning if you have to take an umbrella with you. It might allow you to monitor your well being and health targets, or let you recognize the rating to final evening’s sport. Poke might 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 text after which share them with buddies.
Backed by Spark Capital, General Catalyst, and different angels, the 10-person startup has extra just lately added one other $10 million to its coffers, on high of final yr’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 saying Nvidia’s enterprise-grade different.
But 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, methods like OpenClaw increase safety considerations on account of its deep system entry.
For many individuals, then, OpenClaw and different agentic methods nonetheless really feel out of attain. The workforce behind Poke desires to vary 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 had been utilizing the corporate’s earlier product, an AI assistant for e-mail, constructed round a yr in the past.
“What we noticed there was that people wanted to use Poke for everything… Even though it was only meant for email, people started asking Poke to remind them to take their medication. They asked Poke about sports results — ‘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 this functionality, but we noticed how we needed to become general-purpose much more quickly, because people just like the personality and the humanness of it so much.”
The workforce then partially pivoted and centered on making Poke extra helpful, proactive, and extra personable.
Unlike OpenClaw, getting began with Poke is easy. You merely go to Poke.com, click on “Get Started,” and enter your cellphone quantity. There’s no app to put in as the assistant operates over text messaging.
Under 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 huge AI suppliers or an open supply mannequin.
“I think this is also one of our main strengths in the long run: that almost all of our competitors are just big tech and labs that are bound to a specific provider. Like Meta AI will only ever be able to use Meta models, and ChatGPT will only ever be able to use OpenAI models,” von Hagen factors out.
To work over messaging platforms like iMessage, Poke additionally leverages Linq, a answer that permits AI assistants to reside inside messaging apps. The app can run by SMS and Telegram, too, however WhatsApp help is at present restricted as Meta barred different general-purpose chatbots final fall.
That might change, nevertheless. Regulators from the EU, Italy, and Brazil opened antitrust probes to struggle this determination, which has introduced Poke again to Brazil. It will 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 presents a number of “recipes” — or pre-made instruments that allow you to automate varied facets of your life or work. These span classes like well being and wellness, productiveness, finance, scheduling, journey, dwelling, faculty, e-mail, neighborhood, and, for many who are technical, developer instruments. Installing them requires a click on of a button after which a commonplace authorization course of, if wanted.
These recipes are designed to work with apps and companies 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, as nicely as those who work with sensible dwelling units from corporations like Philips Hue and Sonos.
Developers utilizing Poke may automate elements of their workflow through integrations with instruments like PostHog, Webflow, Supabase, Vercel, Devin, Sentry, GitHub, Cursor Cloud Agents, and others.
Poke’s safety mannequin is multi-layered and consists of common penetration testing, safety checks, varied instruments, and limiting permissions for each agents and human workers. By default, the workforce 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 data. (TechCrunch 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 (primarily based on geography) for each consumer who indicators up for Poke through the recipe.
The price to make use of Poke is surprisingly inexpensive: it’s free to start out, then pricing is versatile. During the beta assessments, customers really needed to negotiate with the AI agent what worth they’d pay monthly, 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. If you’re asking for issues that don’t require real-time information, you may in all probability use Poke totally free. 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 steering on how costly issues are, which permits it to find out customized pricing.
While the corporate has managed to make Poke extra environment friendly to cut back prices, the purpose proper now isn’t profitability, von Hagen notes.
“We really don’t want to make money, but we really want to grow. We want to build a product for a billion people and monetization is really secondary,” he says. “The goal for the next weeks and months now is to bring Poke into everyday life.” To accomplish that, it should look to creators and influencers to showcase how they’re utilizing Poke.
The firm, 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. (However, we did spot Poke on the high of Vercel’s AI Gateway leaderboard for no matter that’s price.)
In addition to its major institutional buyers, Spark Capital and General Catalyst, the startup has attracted the eye of a variety of angels, together with John and Patrick Collison (Stripe founders), Jake and Logan Paul, Logan Kirlpatrick 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 several other others.