An AI startup held a funeral for mobile apps in a church, complete with speeches and a coffin for app icons, and followed it with $4.5M in funding. Photon, which helps developers build agents that work over iMessage and WhatsApp, raised the money to develop its products further. The startup says it signed up over 40,000 developers and grew its revenue 10x in just four months.
San Francisco hosted the occasion on September 17, which Photon dubbed both a developer day and a funeral. Panels were presented by Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI, while the coffin was packed with app icons. Daniel Tian, the CEO, admitted the move was partly in jest, yet he holds that the app era is drawing to a close.
“Honestly, it’s going to take a while, but I think, directionally, it’s inevitable,” Tian said of the shift from apps to agents.
The Case Against Apps
Even if Muse comes to dominate the consumer AI space, Tian sees room for developers who want their applications to work over messaging services. Photon’s argument is simple: users no longer want to install new apps. They want agents that work through messaging apps they already use, like iMessage and WhatsApp. Meta’s Muse, whose app has soared to No. 1 on the app stores, is testing that theory.
The Photon toolkit bundles a unified API, an extensible channel framework, a command-line interface (CLI), and an observability suite into one offering. That combination enables developers to construct and run an agent experience across iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS or RCS, email, voice, and other channels.
From Hackathons to a Startup
Tian and Ryan Zhu, the CTO, began by building consumer apps while still students. Each time they wrapped up a new app, they ran into the same trouble: finding users who would notice it. The solution came when they built an agent inside iMessage. Tian had already created a bot that answered texts for him through iMessage. Once he and Zhu made the underlying technology freely available on GitHub, thousands of developers picked it up.
Tian dropped out of UPenn’s M&T program, and Zhu left high school, later becoming a visiting student at MIT’s Media Lab.
The open-source edition of Photon continues to make up 98% of how it is used today.
Revenue Growth and New Clients
This April, Photon released a managed platform with subscription-based tiers for access. The hosted version carries 99.95% uptime, SOC 2 Type II compliance, and HIPAA-compliance, making it suitable for healthcare agent use cases. Once usage goes past 10 users, developers exit the free tier and move into one of the three paid tiers.
No revenue numbers are being shared by the company, but it did say that revenue rose 10x over a four-month period and that churn remains below 3%. The volume of messages sent has increased 5x in just the last month.
Corgi Insurance, the social introductions app Boardy, Gen Z dating platform Ditto, business banking platform Rho, finance AI assistant Fliptexts, and AI email client Slashy all use Photon’s services. The technology integration partners include Vercel (Eve and ChatSDK) and Nous Research, whose Hermes agent runs on Photon as its default iMessage layer. Tencent’s QClaw and NanoClaw sit atop Photon as well.
| Event | Date | Location |
|---|---|---|
| App Funeral / Developer Day | September 17 | San Francisco |
| Managed platform launch | April | — |
Agents Talking to Agents
The market Tian describes moves beyond agents speaking to people, instead putting agents into conversation with one another. He refers to this shift as the A-to-A communication layer.
“For instance, if a person was chatting with their AI assistant making travel plans, the agent could pull in other agents when needed, like a flight-booking agent or hotel-booking agent,” Tian said. “It’s been pretty powerful to observe the whole A-to-A-to-P [agent-to-agent-to-person] space.”
The Numbers Underneath
The headline is a tongue-in-cheek funeral, but the figures tell the real story. More than 40,000 developers signed up, revenue grew by 10x, messaging volume rose by 5x, and the funding came from Gradient, A*, Vercel, HongShan, Llama Ventures, Karman, and other angel investors.
Tian believes that agents are not a passing fad but instead point toward how the field will develop in the future.
Source material: “Photon held a funeral for mobile apps. Now it has $4.5M to help replace them with agents.,” TechCrunch.
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