Poke

Orbio Raises $21M to Automate Frontline Hiring

Orbio, an enterprise startup founded in 2025 by Sergi Bastardas with co-founders Nacho Travesí and Antonio Melé, announced a $21 million Series A round led by Dawn Capital. The company provides AI-driven workforce management for frontline employees using autonomous agents (named Maria, Daniel, and Claire) to interview candidates, assess fit, monitor output, and run daily check-ins. Customers named by the company include Poke, YUM! Brands and The Stepping Stones Group — the latter reportedly saw 20% more candidates make it through to hire after full deployment. Orbio has raised $26 million to date from investors including Visionaries and 2100 Ventures; the new funding will be used to hire and develop additional AI agents. The startup competes with recruiting and frontline workforce platforms such as Paradox and WorkJam.

WWDC 2026: Apple unveils Siri AI and iOS 27

At WWDC 2026 Apple revealed a major overhaul of Siri and expanded Apple Intelligence features, describing a more conversational, visually aware assistant available as a systemwide experience and standalone app. The new Siri is designed to use "personal context" from Apple-native apps (Messages, Notes, Mail, Calendar, Photos) and to be screen-aware so it can act on what’s visible. Apple emphasized a privacy-first approach: many capabilities run on-device and more complex work can leverage Apple’s private cloud compute (PCC) to avoid exposing user data. Demos (led by Justin Titi, Apple Senior Director of AI engineering) showed Siri searching across a phone to surface a months-old message. The rollout is optional (users can toggle Siri AI off) and raises trade-offs between convenience and personal-data exposure, per TechCrunch commentary by Amanda Silberling.

Apple Approves Poke as First AI Agent on Messages for Business

Poke, a startup from The Interaction Company of California, has become the first third-party AI agent approved to run on Apple’s Messages for Business (iMessage) platform. Launched in March, Poke provides conversational AI services over SMS, Telegram, WhatsApp (in some markets) and will now add iMessage. The approval required alignment with Apple’s UI and support guidelines and allows Poke to offer users optional migration to an iMessage experience. Poke says it has relayed roughly 100 million messages to date. The company will pay Apple a per-user fee (pricing undisclosed). Poke is backed by Spark Capital and General Catalyst, recently raised an additional $10 million, and is valued at $300 million post-money.