Photon held a funeral for mobile apps. Now it has $4.5M to help replace them with agents

The AI startup Photon recently held a unique event—a funeral for mobile apps—believing that agents will eventually replace them. This event took place in a church in San Francisco on September 17, and included speeches and an actual coffin for app icons. Photon, which assists developers in creating agents that operate over platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, has secured $4.5 million in seed funding to further develop its offerings.

Photon's co-founder and CEO Daniel Tian stated that the funeral also served as a developer day, featuring panels from notable companies such as Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI. The startup has seen significant growth, signing up over 40,000 developers and achieving a 10x revenue increase in just four months.

Tian expressed his belief that the era of mobile apps is coming to an end, stating, "Honestly, it’s going to take a while, but I think, directionally, it’s inevitable." The startup's premise is that users prefer agents that function within the messaging apps they already use, rather than installing new applications.

One example of this theory in action is Meta’s Muse, which has risen to the top of app stores. Regardless of Muse's success, Tian sees a market for developers who want their applications to function over messaging services. To support this, Photon offers a suite of tools, including:

• A unified API
• An extensible channel framework
• A command-line interface (CLI)
• An observability suite