TechCrunch1 Oct 2026Sarah Perez

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

Image Credits:PhotonPhoton 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.

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.

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

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