Poke

Poke launched in March 2026 from a ten-person team in Palo Alto and reached hundreds of thousands of users and over 100 million messages, at roughly $1.4M ARR.

On 8 September 2026, a year after Poke was first shown publicly, its founder said on X that people had exchanged over 200 million messages with it, with millions more each week. That is roughly 550,000 messages a day averaged across the year.

What it does not settle is how hard anyone is using it: the company describes its user base only as hundreds of thousands, and at either end of that phrase the same 200 million works out anywhere between one message per user per day and five. The arithmetic is on their two published numbers, and the gap between those answers is the reason a message count on its own tells you very little.

Its significance to anyone building on this channel is regulatory rather than technical: it was the first independent third-party AI agent approved on Apple's Messages for Business, a programme that is otherwise invite-only and closed to new partners. It was acquired by Cognition in a low nine-figure deal four months after launch, with Cognition's founders having been angel investors.

On 11 September 2026 the notice gained a section on Google user data, the first change since June: Gmail and Calendar are accessed only with authorisation and the narrowest scopes, stored only as long as the feature needs, never sold or used for advertising, and not read by a person except with agreement, for security, or under law. It is the Google API Services User Data Policy's Limited Use language, which any product connecting Gmail has to carry to keep its access, and it is more specific about Google's data than the notice is about your messages. The diff is on the changelog.

Read again in September. The privacy notice covers The Interaction Company of California Inc. and all of its brands rather than Poke specifically, which is why several rows here stay empty on a document of forty-six thousand characters: it names Stripe for payments and no model provider, no messaging provider and no retention period. For a product that is given access to your inbox, those are the three worth having.