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

The AI startup Photon is so sure that agents will eventually come to replace mobile apps that it held a funeral for the latter — yes, a real funeral in a church, with speeches and everything. Photon, which helps developers build agents that work over iMessage and WhatsApp, now has $4.5 million in seed funding to develop its products. The raise comes after the company signed up over 40,000 developers grew its revenue 10x in just four months, it says.

Photon co-founder and CEO Daniel Tian said the “app funeral,” held in San Francisco on September 17, was also a developer day for the startup, featuring panels from Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI. It also included an actual coffin for app icons.

The move to host an app funeral was obviously somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but Tian believes the app era is coming to an end. “Honestly, it’s going to take a while, but I think, directionally, it’s inevitable,” he said of the shift from apps to agents.

The thesis behind the startup, as you may have guessed, is that users no longer want to install new apps. Instead, they want access to agents that work through the messaging apps they already use, like iMessage and WhatsApp.

Meta’s Muse, whose app has soared to No. 1 on the app stores, is putting that theory to the test. But even if Muse comes to dominate the consumer AI space, Tian sees a market for serving developers who want their applications to work over messaging services. That’s why Photon is offering a package of tools, including a unified API, an extensible channel framework, a command-line interface (CLI), and an observability suite. Combined, they allow developers to build and operate an agent experience that works over iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS or RCS, email, voice, and more.

Today, the open-source version of Photon still accounts for 98% of its use.

Across both the hosted and open-source versions, the technology reaches millions of end users, Tian estimated.