Startup Photon raises $4.5 million for AI agents that want to replace apps

An artificial intelligence startup so convinced that agents will eventually replace mobile apps that it organized a real “funeral” for them — yes, a real funeral in a church, with eulogies and everything. This is Photon, as TechCrunch reports, which has just raised $4.5 million in a seed round to develop its products.

Co-founder and CEO Daniel Tian told TechCrunch that the “funeral of the apps,” held in San Francisco on September 17, was also a developer day, with panels from Vercel, Stripe and OpenAI — and even a real coffin for app icons. The move was partly humorous, but Tian believes the era of apps is coming to an end: “It will take time, but the direction is inevitable,” he said.

The startup’s thesis, as TechCrunch reports, is that users no longer want to install new apps — they want agents that work through the messaging apps they already use, such as iMessage and WhatsApp. Photon therefore offers a toolkit, including a unified API, an extensible channel framework, a command-line interface (CLI) and an observability suite, that lets developers build and operate agents that work through iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS or RCS, email, voice and more.

The numbers show strong interest: the company has over 40,000 registered developers and its revenue has grown 10-fold in just four months, with less than 3% churn. Photon’s open-source version still accounts for 98% of usage, while the paid managed version — launched in April — offers 99.95% uptime and is SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA certified. The seed round was co-led by Gradient and A*, with participation from Vercel, HongShan, Z Fellows, Llama Ventures, Karman and angel investors. Clients include Corgi Insurance, the banking platform Rho and the AI email client Slashy, while integrations include Vercel, LangChain, Mastra and Telnyx.

Tian also sees a growing market in agent-to-agent communication: “In the future, agents will be able to find the agent that can do the right things,” he told TechCrunch, describing a world where your assistant automatically calls a flight or hotel booking agent when you are planning your trip.