Photon held a funeral for mobile apps. Now it has $4.5M to help replace them with agents.
Photon, a startup that helps developers build AI agents that operate over messaging platforms such as iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS or RCS, email, and voice, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Gradient and A* with participation from Vercel, HongShan, Z Fellows, Llama Ventures, Karman, and other angel investors.
The company said it has signed up more than 40,000 developers and grew revenue 10x in four months. It reported less than 3% churn and said messaging volume grew 5x in the last month. Photon is not sharing revenue figures.
Photon's offering includes a unified API, an extensible channel framework, a command-line interface, and an observability suite. The hosted version of its product offers 99.95% uptime and is SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA-compliant, according to the company. The open source version still accounts for 98% of Photon's use, the company said.
Co-founder and CEO Daniel Tian said an "app funeral" held in San Francisco on September 17, which included a coffin for app icons and panels from Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI, was also a developer day. Tian said the shift from apps to agents will take a while but is directionally inevitable.
Photon emerged from work by Tian and co-founder and CTO Ryan Zhu on consumer apps as students. After they open-sourced an iMessage bot, Tian dropped out of UPenn's M&T program and Zhu left high school, later becoming a visiting student at MIT's Media Lab.
Customers using Photon include Corgi Insurance, Boardy, Ditto, Rho, Fliptexts, and Slashy. Integration partners include Vercel and Nous Research, whose Hermes agent uses Photon as its default iMessage layer. Photon is also the layer under Tencent's QClaw and NanoClaw, with integrations across LangChain, Mastra, Convex, Render, Railway, and Telnyx. Tian estimated the technology reaches millions of end users across both versions.
Tian said he sees potential growth in connecting agents to other agents, describing it as an A-to-A communication layer.
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Publisher excerpt
The startup helps developers build AI agents that work over iMessage, SMS/RCS, email, and other messaging platforms. It's a bet that consumers will increasingly use agents instead of downloading apps.