AI startup Photon held an “app funeral” in San Francisco on September 17 to underscore its view that mobile apps will be replaced by agents operating through messaging services. The event, held in a real church, featured speeches and a coffin bearing app icons. The company raised $4.5 million in seed funding to develop its products.
Photon co-founder and CEO Daniel Tian argues that users will prefer agents operating through existing services such as iMessage and WhatsApp rather than installing new apps. The company offers the following tools for developers to build and operate agents across different channels:
- Unified API
- Extensible channel framework
- Command-line interface (CLI)
- Observability suite
This infrastructure supports iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS or RCS, email, and voice communication. The idea arose from the difficulty Tian and CTO Ryan Zhu faced in getting users to discover the apps they developed as students. When Tian’s bot, which replied to his friends via iMessage as if it were him, was made open source on GitHub, it was adopted by thousands of developers. Tian left UPenn’s M&T program, while Zhu left high school and later became a visiting student at MIT’s Media Lab.
Photon’s open-source version accounts for 98% of usage. The founders launched the paid managed platform with subscription tiers this April. This version offers 99.95% uptime and is also SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliant. More than 40,000 developers have signed up for the platform. Usage exceeding 10 users requires upgrading to one of three paid plans. Although the company did not disclose revenue, it reported 10x revenue growth in four months, customer churn below 3%, and a 5x increase in messaging volume over the past month.
Its customers include:
- Corgi Insurance, Boardy, Ditto, and Rho
- Fliptexts and Slashy
Vercel and Nous Research are among its integration partners. Photon is also used in Tencent’s QClaw and NanoClaw products and has integrations with LangChain, Mastra, Convex, Render, Railway, and Telnyx. The funding round was co-led by Gradient and A*, with participation from Vercel, HongShan, Z Fellows, Llama Ventures, Karman, and angel investors. Tian said the open-source and managed versions have reached millions of end users. In the long term, the company aims to develop the A-to-A layer through which agents communicate with one another.
Why it matters
Photon’s approach broadens the debate over how mobile software should be distributed, as it aims to make AI agents available within the communication channels users already use rather than as a separate application. This highlights the role of a shared infrastructure instead of individual channel integrations for teams developing agents across different messaging services; however, it also raises a separate question about the extent to which the user experience and access will remain dependent on these channels. The fact that the open-source version accounts for 98% of usage and that more than 40,000 developers have registered on the platform shows that interest is not limited to enterprise customers. At the same time, while data on revenue growth and customer churn remain company claims, it remains unclear whether this interest will translate into a sustainable business model.
Term: agent
An AI agent is software that calls tools and carries out multi-step tasks to achieve a goal rather than generating a single response.