Photon held a funeral for mobile apps; plus, Kevin Mandia’s new ‘agent swarm’ security startup

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1:13That's Framer.com slash tcstartups. Rules and restrictions may apply. The AI startup Photon is so sure that agents will eventually come to replace mobile apps that it held a funeral for them. 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 and 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 17th was also a developer day for the startup, featuring panels from Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI.

2:07It 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, saying, Honestly, it's going to take a while, but I think directionally it's inevitable. Now, 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 number one on the app stores, is putting that theory to the test. But even if MUSE comes to dominate the consumer AI space, TNC is a market for serving developers who want their applications to work over messaging services.

2:58That's why Photon is offering a package of tools, including a unified API, an extensible channel framework, a command line interface, 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. The idea for Photon emerged from the time co-founders Tian and Ryan Zhu, the CTO, spent building consumer apps as students, often at hackathons. Every time they finished a new app, they hit the same bottleneck, getting people to discover it. By building an agent that worked with iMessage, they realized they could reach people through an app those people already use every day.

3:48Apple's messages. Tian, for instance, had built a bot that would text his friends back as him over iMessage. When he and Zhu made the technology open source on GitHub, thousands of developers adopted it. So, they went all in. Tien dropped out of UPenn's M &T program, and Zhu left high school, later becoming a visiting student at MIT's Media Lab. Today, the open-source version of Photon still accounts for 98 % of its use. This April, the founders decided to create a managed platform and sell access to it via subscription tiers. This hosted version of the product offers 99.95 % uptime, which is much higher than what you'd get if you were just running the open-source version on your local Mac for a hobby project.

4:37It's also SOC 2, Type 2, and HIPAA compliant, which opens the door to healthcare agent use cases. Today, the startup's platform has attracted over 40 ,000 developer signups and now includes paying clients. Any usage beyond 10 users requires moving out of the free tier to one of the three paid tiers, we're told. The company is not sharing revenue figures, but said that in addition to the 10x revenue growth, it's seeing more than 3 % churn and its messaging volume has grown by 5x in the last month alone. Customers using Photon include Corgi Insurance, Social Introductions app Bordy, Gen Z dating platform Ditto, Business Banking platform Ro, Finance AI Assistant Fliptexts, AI Email Client Slashy, and others building agents for FinTech, Consumer AI, and other vertical use cases.

5:35Photon's technology integration partners also include companies such as Vercel and New Research, whose Hermes agent uses Photon as its default iMessage layer. While today Photon focuses on agents connecting with humans, Tien believes there's potential to grow into an expanding market that involves connecting agents to other agents.

5:59Kevin Mandia, best known as the founder of cybersecurity startup Mandiant, which sold to Google for$5.4 billion back in 2022, has raised$255.5 million for his latest startup, Armiden, at a valuation of more than$2.5 billion. The Series B round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Excel, with Bain Capital Ventures, Redpoint, 8BC Ballistic Ventures, Google Ventures, In-Q-Tel, Kleiner Perkins, and Menlo Ventures joining in. The new round comes just six months after Armiden raised a$190 million Series A in March. It has now raised more than$445 million. Armiden is offering enterprises a new kind of always-on security by reimagining defense testing for the AI era.

6:51Instead of traditional penetration tests where hired guns attempt to break in and report on the weaknesses they find, Armiden runs always-on agentic swarms who chain together vulnerabilities to hack in. The idea is to help organizations find and seal holes before any bad guys or even AI labs with rogue agents can use agentic tech against them. That's all for now. For the latest in startup tech news, go to techcrunch.com.

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