Photon raises $4.5M seed to build agents over messaging
Photon has raised $4.5 million in seed funding co-led by Gradient and A* to develop its platform for building agents over messaging services.
Photon, a startup that provides a platform for building agents over messaging services, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Gradient and A*, with participation from Vercel, HongShan, Z Fellows, Llama Ventures, Karman, and other angel investors.
The company's platform has attracted over 40,000 developer sign-ups and includes paying clients. Photon's revenue grew 10x in four months, with less than 3% churn and messaging volume up 5x in the last month.
Photon offers a unified API, extensible channel framework, CLI, and observability suite for building agents over messaging services.
On September 17, Photon held an 'app funeral' in San Francisco, which also served as a developer day with panels from Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI.
In April, the founders decided to create a managed platform and sell access via subscription tiers. Photon's open-source version still accounts for 98% of its use. Co-founders Daniel Tian and Ryan Zhu built consumer apps as students, often at hackathons. Tian built a bot that would text his friends back as him over iMessage, and when made open source on GitHub, thousands of developers adopted it.
Quick answers
How much did Photon raise in seed funding?
Photon raised $4.5 million in seed funding.
Who led Photon's seed round?
The seed round was co-led by Gradient and A*, with participation from Vercel, HongShan, Z Fellows, Llama Ventures, Karman, and other angel investors.
What does Photon's platform do?
Photon offers a unified API, extensible channel framework, CLI, and observability suite for building agents over messaging services.