AI startup Photon is so confident that agents will eventually replace mobile apps that it held a funeral service for it. Yes, it’s a real funeral with speeches in church. Photon helps developers build agents that run on iMessage and WhatsApp, and has now secured $4.5 million in seed funding to develop its product. The raises come after the company signed on more than 40,000 developers and grew revenue 10x in just four months.
Photon co-founder and CEO Daniel Tian said the “App Funeral” held in San Francisco on September 17th was also developer day for the startup, with panels from Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI on display. It also included an actual coffin for the app icon.
While the move to host funerals on an app was clearly a bit of a joke, Tian believes the days of apps are nearing an end. “Honestly, it’s going to take a while, but I think it’s an inevitable direction,” he said of the transition from apps to agents.
As you can imagine, the theory behind this startup is that users don’t want to install new apps. Instead, you want to access an agent that works through the messaging apps you already use, like iMessage or WhatsApp.
Meta’s Muse’s app is putting that theory to the test as it soars to number one in the app store. But even if Muse comes to dominate the consumer AI space, Tian believes there is a market for it to serve developers who want to run their applications on top of messaging services. That’s why Photon offers a package of tools that includes an integration API, an extensible channel framework, a command-line interface (CLI), and an observability suite. Together, developers can build and operate agent experiences that work with iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS or RCS, email, voice, and more.
The idea for Photon was born when co-founder Tian and CTO Ryan Zhu spent their school days building consumer apps, often at hackathons. Every time you complete a new app, you run into the same bottleneck of getting people to discover it. By building an agent that works within iMessage, we realized that we could reach people through an app they already use every day: Apple’s Messages.
For example, Tian was building a bot that would reply to texts as himself to friends via iMessage. He and Zhu open sourced the technology on GitHub, and thousands of developers adopted it. So they went all out. Tian dropped out of UPenn’s M&T program, and Chu dropped out of high school and later became a visiting student at MIT’s Media Lab.
Today, the open source version of Photon still accounts for 98% of usage.
In April of this year, the founders decided to create a managed platform and sell access to it via a subscription tier. The hosted version of this product provides 99.95% uptime. This is much higher than the uptime you would get if you ran the open source version on your local Mac for a hobby project. It is also SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliant, opening the door to healthcare agent use cases.
To date, the startup’s platform has attracted over 40,000 developer signups and now includes paying clients. (For more than 10 users, users are said to have to move from the free tier to one of three paid tiers.) The company doesn’t release revenue numbers, but says that in addition to a 10x revenue increase, the churn rate is less than 3% and messaging volume has increased 5x in the last month alone.
Customers using Photon include Corgi Insurance. Social introduction app Boardy. The same goes for Gen Z dating platforms. Business banking platform Rho. Financial AI assistant Fliptext. AI email client Slashy. We also build agents for fintech, consumer AI, and other vertical use cases.
Photon’s technology integration partners also include companies such as Vercel (Eve and ChatSDK) and Nous Research, whose Hermes agents use Photon as their default iMessage layer. Photon is also a layer below Tencent’s QClaw and NanoClaw. Additionally, Photon saw framework and infrastructure integration across LangChain, Mastra, Convex, Render, Railway, Telnyx, and more.
Vercel is also one of Photon’s new backers. The startup’s seed round was co-led by Gradient and A*, with participation from Vercel, HongShan, Z Fellows, Llama Ventures, Karman, and other angel investors.
Tian estimates that in both hosted and open-source versions, the technology will reach millions of end users.
Currently, Photon is focused on connecting agents to humans, but Tian believes it has the potential to grow into an expanding market by connecting agents to other agents.
“I think in the future, agents will be able to find the right agent to help them, so it’s going to be an A-to-A communication layer,” Tian said. For example, if a person is chatting with an AI assistant to plan a trip, the agent can bring in other agents as needed, such as a flight booking agent or a hotel booking agent. “Looking at the entire A-to-A-to-P (agent to agent to individual) space is very powerful,” he added.
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