20-Something Founders Debut $100M A.I. Assistant Approved by 6K Silicon Valley Users

For more than a decade, tech companies have promised the arrival of the digital sidekick. Amazon built Alexa to anticipate household needs. Apple gave us Siri, and Google launched Assistant to answer questions and organize daily life. More recently, OpenAI’s ChatGPT showed the raw potential of generative A.I. Yet despite the hype, today’s assistants remain outside the natural flow of conversation. They often demand a separate device, a dedicated app or new user habits. And none have managed to plug into the chaotic center of modern life, where people juggle emails, reminders, travel changes, invoices and group texts. But what if using A.I. felt as effortless as texting a friend—no learning curve, no extra steps?

That’s the bet of Interaction, a Palo Alto startup whose A.I. assistant, “Poke,” slips directly into iMessage. Instead of asking users to download yet another app, the founders designed Poke to meet people where their attention already is: their messaging threads.

Marvin von Hagen and Felix Schlegel, the company’s co-founders, noticed how often people bounce between apps and saw an opportunity to pull A.I. into conversations at the exact moment it’s needed. Poke works like any other contact in iMessage or WhatsApp, instantly able to book a flight, summarize research, or suggest dinner options—all without leaving the thread.

The startup beta tested the idea among more than 6,000 users in Silicon Valley, from companies like OpenAI, Google, Stripe, Figma and Anthropic, who collectively sent more than 200,000 messages each month. Along the way, von Hagen and Schlegel uncovered surprising use cases: a parent asking Poke to generate math exercises for a child during homework, friends planning a Barcelona trip with bookings and itineraries, and even freelancers chasing overdue invoices. They realized that when an assistant blends into the natural rhythm of communication, people discover dozens of uses without ever being taught how.

“Users want easy access to A.I. the same way they text their partner, friends, parents and colleagues,” Schlegel, the company’s CTO, told Observer. He added that, when chatting with Poke, users train the A.I. architecture to learn their preferences through a personalized relevance engine.

“Beta testers shared personal stories and sought relationship advice, not just email-related tasks,” von Hagen, Interaction’s CEO, told Observer. “This taught us that personality, conversationality and emotional intelligence were as important as technical performance.”

Von Hagen, 23, and Schlegel, 25, first met studying computer science at the Technical University of Munich, where they built reputations for tackling outsized projects at unusually young ages. Before launching Interaction, they co-founded TUM Boring, a 65-person student team that twice won Elon Musk’s Not-a-Boring competition by designing and constructing a tunneling machine from scratch.

Von Hagen is also known in the A.I. safety world for exposing vulnerabilities in large language models, helping raise awareness of risks like prompt injection. His probing of Microsoft’s Bing famously uncovered its hidden alter ego, “Sydney,” along with a set of internal rules. He later pursued research on collective intelligence at MIT and interned at Tesla.

Schlegel started coding at 12, creating web and AR apps and presenting onstage at Apple’s WWDC before finishing high school. He went on to research simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) at the University of Cambridge and later joined Stanford as a researcher in machine learning and biodesign.

A $100 million bet

That mix of technical depth and early ambition helped persuade investors like General Catalyst. “Interacting with Poke over iMessage is like having an assistant that interacts in a tone almost like a close friend,” Yuri Sagalov, managing director at General Catalyst and one of the 6,000 beta testers on the app, told Observer. “It shows personality and demonstrates an understanding of you, making the experience feel both personal and useful.”

Investors see Poke’s advantage in its timing: messaging apps have become command centers of modern life, and an A.I. that can slip seamlessly into those threads could tap into nearly every corner of a smartphone. Banking on that belief, Interaction officially launched last week after months of private testing.

Alongside the launch, the company announced a $15 million seed round valuing Interaction at $100 million. The round was led by General Catalyst and Village Global, with participation from Earlybird VC and angel investors including PayPal co-founder Ken Howery, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, former Google VP Bradley Horowitz and OpenAI researcher Karina Nguyen.

The founders envision a future with fewer standalone apps, where A.I. proactively surfaces what matters—an upcoming deadline, an unanswered email—before the user even asks. To do this, Poke combines models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Voyage and Mistral AI with in-house, fine-tuned models, balancing speed and cost. The team hasn’t disclosed which models handle specific tasks.

Questions about privacy and scaling

Still, the question looms: will users trust an A.I. in their iMessage threads, with access to sensitive data like payments or work messages? Von Hagen and Schlegel say they’re addressing those concerns head-on. Interaction is building on SOC 2 compliance standards and planning integrations with financial services, scheduling and team tools.

“By default, our users are in ‘Maximum Privacy’ mode, which creates a complete data firewall, so even our engineers can’t access conversations or emails. We’re transparent about what data Poke needs to function and why, giving users granular control over what they share,” Schlegel said.

The real test, however, will be whether people outside Silicon Valley want an assistant that doesn’t live on the home screen. “We will prioritize localization to make Poke available in more countries, expand our phone number coverage with international codes, and build distributed infrastructure to reduce response times outside the U.S.,” Schlegel said. “A family in Mumbai might use Poke in Hindi on WhatsApp with intermittent connectivity, which presents very different challenges than serving Palo Alto founders on the latest iPhone.”