A 23-year-old German kid raised $15 million in seed funding with a valuation of $200k.

He integrated an AI agent into iMessage.
The logic behind Poke is actually very simple — you don’t need to download any app, learn any new interface, just send a message in iMessage, and the AI will do the work for you. Reply to emails, pay bills, reschedule meetings, book flights.
Led by General Catalyst, with investments from Stripe, Dropbox, and OpenAI team members.
6,000 beta users within Silicon Valley VC circles, sending 200k messages per month.
A truly useful AI product doesn’t need to educate users.
The founder is Marvin von Hagen, who previously did something even crazier — built a 12-meter-long, 22-ton tunnel boring machine with 65 students, winning Elon Musk’s Not-a-Boring competition.
iMessage is Apple’s turf, and Apple can do the same at any time.
Poke is betting on speed — to establish user habits before Apple reacts.
This is exactly the same logic as the mini-programs back in the day: platforms don’t do well in certain areas, third parties step in first, and once they grow big enough, they gain bargaining chips.