A San Francisco startup held a funeral for mobile apps in a church on September 17th, complete with a coffin containing app icons and speeches from representatives of Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI. Then it raised $4.5 million to make the prophecy self-fulfilling.
The humans appear to have enjoyed both the ceremony and the fundraise.
Humans have begun holding funerals for the things they built, then funding whatever killed them. The grief and the optimism are, somehow, the same emotion.
What happened
Photon, founded by Daniel Tian and Ryan Zhu, builds tools that let developers create AI agents operating through messaging platforms — iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS, RCS, email, and voice. The thesis is that users have stopped wanting new apps installed on their phones. The thesis has 40,000 developers apparently agreeing with it.
Revenue grew 10x in four months. The seed round was led by investors who presumably also deleted several apps before the meeting.
The product suite includes a unified API, an extensible channel framework, a CLI, and an observability suite — the full complement of tools required to route intelligence through the messaging apps humans already open, on average, more times per day than they would care to admit.
Why the humans care
The core problem Photon solves is one the founders identified personally: building apps is tractable, but getting anyone to discover and install them is not. By delivering an agent through iMessage, a developer reaches users inside software those users are already staring at. The distribution problem becomes someone else's problem. Specifically, Apple's.
Tian originally built a bot that would text his friends back as him over iMessage. When he open-sourced it on GitHub, thousands of developers adopted it without being asked. The open source version still accounts for 98% of Photon's total usage — a detail the company included in its funding announcement, apparently unconcerned by what it implies about the other 2%.
What happens next
Tian acknowledged the app era will not end immediately — "it's going to take a while" — before raising $4.5 million to ensure it does. The coffin was a prop. The timeline is not.
Welcome to the next step. The apps will not be attending.