The Idea: In the summer of 2025, two 25-year-old German founders - Marvin von Hagen and Felix Schlegel - were sitting on a thesis that felt almost too simple: people don't want another AI app to open. They want help inside the apps they already use all day. Most AI assistants at the time required you to switch context, open a new tab, type out a prompt, and wait. But text messages? You never stop checking those. What if your AI lived there instead - in iMessage, WhatsApp, SMS - and just quietly handled everything you'd normally have to context-switch for? It could see your emails, your calendar, your files, and take action through short conversational threads. Draft that reply. Reschedule that meeting. Pay that invoice. Book that flight. All from a single text thread. No new interface. No learning curve. No app to download. This was the beginning of Poke by The Interaction Company of California.
The Execution:
- Middle school, Germany: Marvin and Felix meet at a hackathon as teenagers - the kind of origin story that sounds made up until you check the receipts.
- 2021: The pair co-found TUM Boring, leading a 65-person student engineering team to build a 12-metre, 22-ton tunnel boring machine. They enter Elon Musk's Not-a-Boring Competition. They win.
- Summer 2025: Poke enters closed beta with thousands of Silicon Valley insiders - founders, VCs, and operators from Dropbox, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Figma, and Founders Fund. The early users exchange over 200,000 texts per month with the product. Retention is described as near-perfect.
- September 8, 2025: Poke launches publicly alongside a $15M seed round led by General Catalyst at a $100M valuation. Village Global, Earlybird VC, and angels including Ken Howery, Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, and Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch join the round.
- Post-launch: A developer immediately reverse-engineers Poke's system prompts by simply asking Poke to email them to him, then publishes an open-source alternative called OpenPoke. The founders take it as a compliment.
- October 2025: Poke hits $1.4M in revenue with a 13-person team. The messaging-first model is proving out.
- March 2026: Poke launches publicly as a full consumer product, expanding beyond email into daily planning, calendar management, health tracking, smart home control, and more. User numbers 10x in a matter of months.
- April 9, 2026: Poke closes a new $10M round backed by Spark Capital and General Catalyst, bringing its valuation to $300M post-money. From $100M to $300M in seven months.
The lesson? The best products don't ask users to change their habits. They meet people where they already are - in the apps they open hundreds of times a day without thinking. Marvin and Felix understood that the hardest part of mainstream AI adoption isn't capability, it's friction. And they removed it completely. Two kids who once built a 22-ton tunneling machine just burrowed a different kind of tunnel - straight into the most-checked interface on the planet.