Scanned TechCrunch: Photon held a real “App funeral” at a San Francisco church—complete with a coffin, eulogies, and even the app icon being laid to rest. The panel invited Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI. Now the seed round has raised $4.5 million, co-led by Gradient and A*, with follow-on participation from Vercel, HSG (Sequoia China), Z Fellows, Llama Ventures, Karman, and others.
What they’re doing is letting developers run Agents on iMessage / WhatsApp / Telegram / SMS / RCS / email / voice—so people don’t have to install yet another new app. They claim 40,000+ developers registered, 10x revenue growth in four months, churn of less than 3%, and the open-source version accounts for about 98% of usage. Founder Daniel Tian dropped out of Penn’s M&T, and CTO Ryan Zhu left high school early (later did a visiting stint at the MIT Media Lab).
People really are getting lazier about installing new apps. Talking about the path of Agents directly in the message feels quite realistic—whether you can truly bury the “app era” is another story.
#AI #Agent #Photon
What they’re doing is letting developers run Agents on iMessage / WhatsApp / Telegram / SMS / RCS / email / voice—so people don’t have to install yet another new app. They claim 40,000+ developers registered, 10x revenue growth in four months, churn of less than 3%, and the open-source version accounts for about 98% of usage. Founder Daniel Tian dropped out of Penn’s M&T, and CTO Ryan Zhu left high school early (later did a visiting stint at the MIT Media Lab).
People really are getting lazier about installing new apps. Talking about the path of Agents directly in the message feels quite realistic—whether you can truly bury the “app era” is another story.
#AI #Agent #Photon
