Photon

"The Next App Is a Contact." Our second panel at The APP Funeral was the consumer side of the same question, moderated by Julie C., CMO at Photon. On stage: Eric Liu, Co-Founder and CTO at Ditto Sebastian Scott, Co-Founder at Clera Sanjay Amirthraj, CEO at FlipTexts Harsha Gaddipati, CEO at Slashy Four founders, and Photon partners, building very different products landed on the same set of problems: what someone has to believe before they hand an agent something personal, why most AI products get opened twice and never again, and what it actually takes to earn a place in a daily habit. The consensus had less to do with model advancement and more to do with where the product lives, and product design, to reach users on the interfaces they already use. Something you have to open is competing for attention, whereas something that texts you is already in the conversation! At Photon, we provide the lines for agents to reach customers in their native channels, and we are so grateful for the on pointe advice from all the speakers that came on behalf of Photon’s partners and Photon’s developer ecosystem.

"After the App: Where Do Agents Live?" Our first panel at The APP Funeral brought together the people building the layer agents actually run on, moderated by Josh Constine, Solo GP at Unexpected Investments. On stage: Andrew Qu, Chief of Software at Vercel Hayden Bleasel MTS at OpenAI Shirley Zhou, Product at Stripe Shuhao Zhang, Cofounder and CPO at TinyFish The conversation surrounded the next generation of agents from an infrastructure perspective: what breaks at scale, how much autonomy a user will actually grant, and what it takes for an agent to be trusted with real work instead of demos. The through line was that the interface reaches people, but the true questions going forward surround reliability, permissions, and reach to decide where an agent can live and what it can access in your messaging channels. That surface integration layer is what we are building at Photon, and we are so grateful for the on pointe advice from all the speakers that came on behalf of Photon’s partners and Photon’s developer ecosystem.

We held a funeral for apps. 200 people: devs building the future of agent infra, founders building real personal agents, and many more, showed up. We hosted it in a 1914 San Francisco chapel that used to be a mortuary, a nod to the night’s theme, with an actual coffin at the center of the room to mark the death of the app, and a moment of silence to bury it properly. Photon’s cofounders, Daniel Tian and Ryan Zhu opened with "Agents, Go Everywhere." Two panels followed, and the insights were all about shaping the interface of the future using an all-in-one channel unifying API for agents. The rest of the event was filled with exclusive product launches, special community-built features, a photobooth that stayed busy all evening, food, drinks, and crucial conversations that went long into the night! Everyone committed to the theme, joining with the best attire for our App Funeral! Thank you to every speaker, builder, and friend of Photon who came: Our speakers, Andrew Qu Hayden Bleasel Shirley Zhou Shuhao Zhang Josh Constine Julie C. Eric Liu Sebastian Scott Sanjay Amirthraj Harsha Gaddipati & so many more attendees! Apps die, and agents live where you already are. We are so excited for all the announcements upcoming!

Photon gives AI agents a phone number people actually text And thanks to Telnyx, we can make agents accessible to everyone

For any Y Combinator alumni in town this weekend for Alumni demo day. Us, Photon, Aayush Gupta are hosting a bbq hang on labor day. Link for anyone interested: https://lnkd.in/gJzRRmVE

Consumer founders in New York, we're saving you a seat. On September 3rd, Photon & Rho are co-hosting a Michelin-style consumer founder dinner in NYC. The best conversations we've had this year didn't happen on a stage. They happened over dinner, sharing stories and advice from building over a good meal. RSVP at the link below to get a seat at the table!

Photon is now SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliant. When you give an agent a phone number, you hand it the most sensitive surface there is. Names, account numbers, health questions: whatever a user types lands in a thread, and someone has to be accountable for what happens after. SOC 2 Type II isn't a badge. It's independent, audited proof of how customer data is secured, stored, retained, and handled when something breaks, verified over months, not a snapshot. HIPAA compliance means healthcare companies can build on Photon and agents can communicate with patients. Trust in agentic messaging is borrowed. Customers trust the company that texts them. That company trusts us. Compliance holds the chain together so nobody has to rely on good intent. Ship at scale, safely, with Photon. Verified by Comp AI

Yesterday, Photon co-hosted the Moonlighting Hackathon alongside some of the biggest partners in tech. 400+ builders, and 10+ amazing cohosts: Build Club Google DeepMind / Gemini Exa WorkOS Convex GMI Cloud Mosaic Vapi ElevenLabs AdaL / Sylph Apify The challenge: to launch a side hustle in one night. Researchers, engineers, and technical founders had 60 minutes to build, ship, and demo with some of the latest AI Tools. Our very own Julie C. was a speaker and judge, demoing Photon live with an iMessage Pitch Challenge, and onboarding 100+ developers! And, the winners of the hackathon, Jacky Zhong & Daniel Ou used Photon in their hack stack, creating Six Degrees: a platform to show how many degrees you are from someone else in your network, using Photon to send invites as a real iMessage. So many more impressive builds came out of the room, and we’re excited to see what teams keep shipping from here! We can’t wait for the next hack night! Shoutout to the wonderful organizers and speakers: Annie Liao 🇦🇺 Paige Bailey Jonah Berman Wayne Sutton Roan Weigert 🤖 Adish Jain Antonio Aguirregomezcorta Alvarez Julie C. Aria Shi Petros Hong Amanda Martin

120 days and 76 versions later, Photon is now the #1 messaging API infrastructure on the market. 9 months ago, this started as an open-source iMessage Kit built by developers for developers, sitting at a handful of users. 6 months ago, we were explaining what an iMessage API even was. the first week of launch, Spectrum-Ts had barely hit 100 downloads. now, it sits at over 250K. since then:  - Nous Research shipped Hermes into iMessage on Photon.  - our iMessage adapter is Vendor-Official in Vercel Chat SDK directory - Photon is the official iMessage host for Mastra agents as a founder, you constantly ask the same question: how do you know you’re building something users truly want? how do you keep going forward when the momentum is slow? after processing millions of messages across production deployments, the numbers can speak for themselves. what initially started as slow growth: less than 1000 downloads and 0 partnerships, has turned into a messaging ecosystem that now has Photon as the foundation. Photon is building true access for agents to reach anyone’s fingertips, and we see no sign of stopping. big things coming up, follow along.

$100M+ in enterprise revenue. That is what our CRO Daisy Hoang, M.S. built. On Aug 13 she is cohosting a fireside chat with Photon co-founder Daniel Tian to unpack how she did it. Every AI founder hits the same wall. You close the first three customers yourself. Then what? Can anyone else sell this? Daisy and Daniel will work through it: -PMF signals that are real -Your first GTM hire -Metrics that prove repeatability -Comp across PLG and enterprise -Channel partners -Going international Space is limited. Registration is subject to approval. Register here: https://lnkd.in/eJKmNBab