In some cases, you may have a hot product but don’t know it until the market demands it.
After launching as a digital business card that also served as a lead generation tool for sales teams, Linq, based in Birmingham, Alabama, pivoted several times before landing on an idea last year. The idea was to help businesses better communicate with their customers by upgrading from SMS (text) to iMessage and RCS.
Now, Apple is already making this possible for businesses through its Messages for Business service, and Twilio has built an $18.26 billion business by helping businesses send text messages to their customers. However, users will always know that they are talking to a company. Text appears in gray and branding is often obvious.
However, Linq’s customers wanted to be able to send bubble messages to their customers in blue, rather than green or gray, to give credibility to their communications.
The startup, founded by former Shipt executives Elliott Potter (CEO), Patrick Sullivan (CTO), and Jared Mattson (President), listened to that feedback and launched an API in February 2025 that allows businesses to message customers natively within iMessage, leveraging all the features Apple’s platform offers iPhone users, including group chats, emojis, threaded replies, images, and voice notes. Co-founder and CEO Elliott Potter told TechCrunch that in less than eight months, Linq doubled the annual recurring revenue it had built over four years.
However, Linq was not satisfied with its newfound product-market fit, as the advent of AI agents gave it an even larger market to sell its technology to. The idea was sparked by an AI assistant called Poke that can handle tasks, answer questions, and schedule calendars from within. iMessage was an important catalyst for the company’s refocus on the agent market.
“Last spring, a company called Interaction Company of California came to us and was building an AI assistant called poke.com and said, ‘We don’t have a CRM, but we would love to use an API,'” Potter told TechCrunch.
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Potter said Poke took off quickly when it launched last September, resulting in his team being inundated with requests to use the messaging API. Suddenly, a lot of AI companies wanted to offer chatbots and assistants directly through iMessage, RCS, and SMS.
Linq now had to decide whether to maintain its original stable revenue stream of serving B2B clients or pivot again to leverage its technology stack to become the infrastructure layer for a new segment of the AI market.
“We still love our sales customers and we still love their use cases. But our choice was: do we stay as spokes of this wheel or do we build a hub? Do we focus on being the infrastructure layer for all the different applications of programmatic messaging?”
Potter believes consumers are suffering from app fatigue. But with Linq’s technology, your AI assistant can work entirely within your messaging app, so you don’t need to use a separate app to interact with it. Developers also don’t have to worry about building apps because they just need to build for the messaging native interface.
“Poke.com, like other companies, has proven that AI is good enough,” Potter said. “You don’t need a traditional app to do anything anymore. All you really need is an interface that allows you to interact with a sufficiently intelligent AI, potentially connect it to parts of your system, tell it what to do, and give it feedback.”
Linq ultimately pivoted, saying its customer base grew 132% sequentially and customer accounts grew an average of 34%. The customer’s AI agents currently reach 134,000 monthly active users through the platform. The company claims to process over 30 million messages per month, resulting in 295% net revenue retention with zero churn.
The company announced Monday that it has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by TQ Ventures to continue developing its technology. Mucker Capital and some angel investors also participated. The company plans to use the new cash to expand its team, develop new go-to-market activities and build out its technology. Linq has not disclosed its valuation.
Rosy prospects aside, the reality is that, at least for now, Linq is still built on Apple’s platform. It remains to be seen whether Apple will withdraw Meta and ban third parties from offering AI chatbots on its platform. Additionally, while iMessage is popular in the United States, other messaging services such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, and Signal are also used in other parts of the world.
But Potter says Linq’s ultimate goal goes beyond messaging. “Our vision for the platform is everything you need to build conversational technology, and it’s not limited to a few channels. Today, we have programmatic voice, and iMessage, RCS, and SMS. Yes, this is just the beginning. Our goal is to be able to talk to our customers wherever they are, whether it’s on Slack, email, Telegram, Discord, or Signal.”
“By making communication between AI and humans as smooth as sending a text message to a friend, Linq enables a whole new category of companies,” Andrew Marks, co-founder partner at TQ Ventures, said in a statement. “Linq’s founding team is an extraordinary talent and we have no doubt in their ability to execute on this significant opportunity.”
