Poke Brings AI Agents to Your Phone via Text, Raises $15 Million

A 23-year-old CEO who once built a 22-ton tunneling machine to win a competition hosted by Elon Musk had a different kind of infrastructure problem in mind next: getting AI agents onto the phones of everyday users, without asking them to download a single new app.

Marvin von Hagen and his co-founder Felix Schlegel, 25, publicly launched Poke on September 8, 2025, alongside a $15 million seed round at a $100 million valuation. The round was led by General Catalyst, with Village Global, Earlybird VC, CDTM Venture Fund, and Everyday Intelligence also participating. Angel investors included Ken Howery, Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, Cognition CEO Scott Wu, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, and Cory Levy, with additional backing from executives at Stripe, Dropbox, Google, and OpenAI.

Poke, built by The Interaction Company of California and headquartered in Palo Alto, operates entirely within iMessage, SMS, and WhatsApp. There is no app to download and no interface to learn. Users connect their email, calendar, and other accounts; Poke then surfaces relevant items in short conversational text bubbles and handles tasks with a single tap, including drafting email replies, paying invoices, rescheduling meetings, and booking travel.

Von Hagen framed the product's thesis plainly: "Users don't want another app. They want to text an AI the same way they text their partner, friends, parents, and colleagues. Poke provides this experience done right — short messages, one-tap actions, built with privacy as a foundation."

Under the hood, Poke runs on a multi-agent architecture. An "Interaction Agent" acts as an orchestrator, fielding user queries and deploying task-specific "Execution Agents" as needed. Onboarding uses an AI "bouncer" that negotiates account access and learns user preferences from the start, and the system is designed to proactively surface signals across connected accounts rather than wait for a user prompt.

The beta metrics that drew institutional backing are striking. Approximately 6,000 Silicon Valley insiders, including founders, VCs, and operators from Dropbox, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Figma, Founders Fund, Cognition, and General Catalyst itself, tested Poke during the summer of 2025. Those users exchanged more than 200,000 texts per month with the service; across the first several thousand users total, The Interaction Company logged over 750,000 messages and reported near-perfect retention rates.

Yuri Sagalov, Managing Director at General Catalyst, said: "Sometimes you discover a user experience that feels like uncovering a hidden secret. Marvin and Felix did just that. The experience of interacting with Poke over iMessage is magical. It's like having your best assistant be with you in the interface you already use every single day."

The privacy question is central for a product that requires access to a user's inbox and calendar. Poke holds SOC 2 Type II and CASA Tier 2 certifications and undergoes regular penetration testing by outside cybersecurity firms. The company states it can see metadata such as when emails arrive and how long they are, but does not read message contents or sell data to third parties. Pricing varies by user.

The launch generated immediate developer interest: one engineer reverse-engineered Poke's system prompts by simply asking Poke to email them to him, then published an open-source alternative called OpenPoke that mirrors the multi-agent orchestration stack with Gmail and reminder integrations.

The founders' backstory is unusual even by Silicon Valley standards. Von Hagen and Schlegel met at a middle school hackathon in Germany and went on to lead TUM Boring, a 65-person student engineering team that built a 12-meter, 22-ton tunneling machine and won Elon Musk's 2021 Not-a-Boring Competition. The pair brought academic and professional experience from Tesla, Apple, Stanford, and MIT, and their broader team at The Interaction Company includes IOI medal winners and alumni of Jane Street and Citadel.

The market context makes the timing legible. SMS carries a 98% open rate and an average response time of 90 seconds, according to Gartner, making it among the highest-attention channels in consumer technology. Approximately 65% of businesses incorporated SMS into their marketing strategies in 2024, up from 45% in 2022, and the U.S. SMS marketing market is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 20.8% through 2030. The bet behind Poke is that the hardest part of mainstream AI adoption is not capability but friction, and the text thread is already the one place most people never stop checking.