AI The startup is Photon very confident that "agents will ultimately replace mobile applications," and they even held a "funeral" for the latter – yes, a real funeral held in a church with speeches and all the formalities. Photon helps developers build agents that can run on iMessage and WhatsApp. The company has now raised $4.5 million in seed funding to develop its products. They stated that before this financing round, they had attracted over 40,000 developers to sign up and achieved a tenfold increase in revenue in just four months.
Co-founder and CEO Daniel Tian stated that the "App Funeral" held on September 17th in San Francisco was also the company's Developer Day event, which featured thematic discussions from Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI. A coffin was actually prepared for the event, with app icons placed inside of it.
Holding an "application funeral" obviously carries a hint of irony, but Tian believes that the era of applications is coming to an end. "To be honest, it will take some time, but I think in terms of direction, this is inevitable," he said when discussing the shift from applications to agents.
The core judgment of this startup, as you may have already guessed, is that users no longer want to install new apps. Instead, they hope to access these agents through the messaging apps they are already using—such as iMessage and WhatsApp.
Muse of Meta is testing this theory. Its application has topped the list in app stores. However, even if Muse ultimately dominates the consumer AI market, Tian still believes that there is a market for serving developers who wish to run their applications through messaging services. This is also why Photon provides a complete set of tools, which includes a unified, scalable channel framework, a command-line interface ( CLI ), and an observability suite. Together, these tools enable developers to build and operate an agent experience that can run on iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS, RCS, email, voice, and other channels.
The idea of Photon originated from the experience of co-founders Tian and CTO Ryan Zhu when they were still students, developing consumer applications. They frequently participated in hackathons. Every time they completed a new application, they encountered the same bottleneck: how to get people to discover it. Later on, by building an agent that ran within iMessage, they realized that they could reach users through applications that people already used every day – Apple's Messages.
For example, Tian once created a robot that could reply to friends' messages in his identity through iMessage. When he and Zhu open-sourced this technology on GitHub, thousands of developers began to adopt it. As a result, the two decided to devote themselves fully to it. Tian dropped out of the M&T program at the University of Pennsylvania, while Zhu left high school to later become a visiting student at the MIT Media Lab.
Today, the open-source version of Photon still accounts for 98% of its usage volume.
In April of this year, the two founders decided to create a hosting platform and sell access rights through tiered subscriptions. This hosted version of the product offers 99.95% uptime, which is significantly higher than what developers can achieve when running the open-source version on their local Mac for amateur projects. It also meets the standards of SOC, Type II, and HIPAA, which opens the door for intelligent agent applications in the healthcare sector.
To date, the platform of this startup has attracted over 40,000 developers to register, and it already has paying customers. (It is mentioned that any usage with more than 10 users requires an upgrade from the free tier to one of three paid tiers.) The company has not disclosed its revenue figures, but it stated that in addition to a tenfold increase in revenue, the customer churn rate is less than 3%, and in just the past month alone, its message processing volume has increased by five times.
The technical integration partners of Photon also include Vercel (which includes Eve and ChatSDK), as well as Nous Research. The Hermes agent of the latter uses Photon as the default iMessage layer. Photon is also the technical layer adopted by Tencent's QClaw and NanoClaw. In addition, Photon has also been integrated with frameworks and infrastructures such as LangChain, Mastra, Convex, Render, Railway, and Telnyx.
Vercel is also one of the new investors in Photon. The company's seed round of financing was co-led by Gradient and A*, with participation from Vercel, Sequoia China's rebranded HongShan, Z Fellows, Llama Ventures, Karman, and other angel investors.
Tian It is estimated that, combined between the hosted version and the open-source version, this technology has reached millions of end-users.
Although currently, Photon focuses on connecting agents with humans, Tian believes that the company has the opportunity in the future to enter a rapidly expanding market, which is to connect agents with other agents.
Tian said, "I believe that in the future, agents will be able to find for you another agent that can complete the task correctly – so it will become the communication layer between A-to-A. For example, if a person is chatting with their own AI assistant and making travel plans, this agent can call upon other agents when needed, such as an air ticket booking agent or a hotel booking agent." "Observing the development of the entire A-to-A-to-P (from agent to agent to human) field is already very interesting and powerful," he added.
