Photon, an AI startup, has raised $4.5 million in a seed round co-led by Gradient and A*, with participation from Vercel, HSG, Z Fellows, Llama Ventures, Karman and angel investors.
The company says it has attracted more than 40,000 developer sign-ups, grown revenue tenfold in four months, maintained churn below 3%, and seen messaging volume increase fivefold in the past month.
Photon provides a unified API, channel framework, CLI and an observability suite that let developers build agents that operate over iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS, email, voice and other channels.
Photon’s platform and traction
Photon traces its origins to an open source iMessage bot the founders built as students; that bot drew thousands of developers and still accounts for 98% of usage. In April the company launched a hosted platform that it says delivers 99.95% uptime and complies with SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA standards.
Customers named by the company include Corgi Insurance, Boardy, Ditto and Rho, and Photon powers Nous Research’s Hermes agent.
Founders and vision
Co-founder and CEO Daniel Tian and CTO Ryan Zhu conceived the idea after struggling to get users to discover their student-built apps. Tian said the shift from apps to agents will take time but is inevitable; the company marked that belief with a tongue-in-cheek app funeral in San Francisco in September. Tian also sees future growth in agent-to-agent communication.
Image credit: Photon
