Photon held a funeral for mobile apps. Now it has $4.5M to help replace them with agents.

Photon, an AI startup that helps developers build agents working over messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. The company notably held a symbolic "app funeral" in San Francisco on September 17, featuring an actual coffin for app icons and developer panels from Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI. Founded by co-founders Daniel Tian (CEO) and Ryan Zhu (CTO), Photon emerged from their experience as students discovering the bottleneck of app discoverability. Tian dropped out of UPenn's M&T program and Zhu left high school after their open-source iMessage bot gained thousands of developers on GitHub. Today, the open-source version still accounts for 98% of Photon's usage, while a managed platform launched in April offers 99.95% uptime and SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliance. The platform has attracted over 40,000 developer sign-ups, achieved 10x revenue growth in four months, and has less than 3% churn, with messaging volume growing 5x in the last month alone. Customers include Corgi Insurance, Boardy, Ditto, Rho, and others building agents for fintech, consumer AI, and other verticals. Integration partners include Vercel, Nous Research, and Tencent. The seed round was co-led by Gradient and A*, with participation from Vercel, HongShan, Z Fellows, Llama Ventures, and Karman. Looking ahead, Tian envisions Photon growing beyond human-agent interactions into an agent-to-agent communication layer, where agents can summon other agents like flight-booking or hotel-booking specialists during conversations.

(Source：TechCrunch)