Photon held a funeral for mobile apps. Now it has $4.5M to help replace them with agents
Photon raised $4.5 million seed to let developers run agents over iMessage, WhatsApp, and other channels.
AI startup Photon, which helps developers run agents over messaging channels, raised $4.5 million in seed funding co-led by Gradient and A*, with participation from Vercel, HongShan, and others. Founders Daniel Tian and Ryan Zhu report more than 40,000 developer sign-ups, 10x revenue growth in four months, churn under 3%, and 5x messaging volume in the last month. The hosted service claims 99.95% uptime plus SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliance, while the open-source version still accounts for about 98% of use. Named users and integrations include Corgi, Boardy, Rho, Nous Research's Hermes agent, Tencent's QClaw, and LangChain.
32