A Startup Held a Funeral for Apps — Now It Has $4.5M to Replace Them

On September 17, in a San Francisco church, an AI startup called Photon threw a real funeral for mobile apps. There were speeches, panels from companies like Stripe and OpenAI, and an actual coffin holding app icons. It was a joke, but only half of one. Days later, the company announced $4.5 million in seed funding to build the thing it thinks comes next.

Photon's big idea is simple: you are tired of downloading apps. Instead of installing something new, you would text an AI assistant inside the messaging app you already use — iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, even plain SMS or email. The assistant can then do real work for you: answer questions, take actions, pull up information. Photon doesn't build those assistants itself. It sells the plumbing to developers who do, so a single build works across all those messaging channels at once.

The business is growing fast. Photon says it has over 40,000 developer sign-ups, revenue that grew tenfold in just four months, and messaging volume up five times in the last month alone. Its paying customers include an insurance company, a Gen Z dating app, a business banking platform, and an AI email client. Because its paid version is certified for handling sensitive health data, hospitals and health apps can use it too. Investors include Vercel, HongShan, and others.

So should you delete your app store? Not yet. Photon's founders admit the shift will 'take a while,' and big players like Meta are testing the same idea with their own assistant apps. But the direction is clear: in a few years, texting an AI could feel as normal as opening an app does today.