Generally, you may be sitting on a sizzling product and never realize it till the market calls for it.
After launching as a digital enterprise card that doubled as a lead seize instrument for gross sales groups, Birmingham, Alabama-based Linq pivoted a number of occasions earlier than touchdown on an thought final yr: serving to companies higher talk with their prospects by upgrading from SMS (textual content) to iMessage and RCS.
Now, Apple already lets companies do that through its Messages for Enterprise service, and Twilio has constructed an $18.26 billion enterprise by serving to firms textual content their prospects. However customers can all the time inform once they’re speaking to a enterprise — the texts are displayed in grey, and the branding is usually apparent.
Linq’s prospects, although, wished to have the ability to ship blue-bubble messages to their prospects, not inexperienced or grey, to lend an air of authenticity to their communications.
The startup, based by former Shipt executives Elliott Potter (CEO), Patrick Sullivan (CTO), and Jared Mattsson (president), heard that suggestions and launched an API in February 2025 that lets firms message their prospects natively inside iMessage, leveraging all of the capabilities Apple’s platform affords to iPhone customers, like group chats, emojis, threaded replies, pictures, and voice notes. Inside eight months, Linq had doubled its annual recurring income it had constructed over 4 years, Potter informed TechCrunch.
Linq was not content material with its newfound product-market match, nevertheless, as the arrival of AI brokers gave the corporate a good bigger market to promote its tech to. That concept was sparked by an AI assistant referred to as Poke that may deal with duties, reply questions, and schedule your calendar from inside iMessage and was a key catalyst within the firm’s refocusing on the agentic market.
“In spring of final yr, this firm got here to us, referred to as the Interplay Firm of California, and so they had been constructing this AI assistant referred to as poke.com and so they had been like, ‘Hey, we we don’t have a CRM, however we actually need to use your API’,” Potter informed TechCrunch.
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Poke went viral at launch final September, which, Potter says, led to his crew being inundated with requests for tapping their messaging API. Unexpectedly, a slew of AI firms wished to supply their chatbots and assistants straight by iMessage, RCS, and SMS.
Linq now had a choice to make: stick to its unique, regular income stream from serving B2B shoppers, or pivot as soon as once more to leverage its tech stack and turn out to be an infrastructure layer for a brand new section of the AI market.
“We nonetheless love our gross sales prospects, and we love that use case, however our decisions had been, can we keep a spoke of this wheel, or can we construct the hub? Will we give attention to being the infrastructure layer for all these completely different functions of programmatic messaging?”
Potter thinks that customers are affected by app fatigue; however with Linq’s expertise, there’s no want to make use of one other app to work together with AI assistants as they’ll all stay inside their messaging app. Additionally, builders gained’t have to fret about constructing an app since they’ll simply construct for a messaging-native interface as an alternative.
“Poke.com, together with others, have proved that AI has gotten adequate,” Potter mentioned. “You don’t want a conventional app anymore to do issues. Actually, you simply want an interface that can allow you to discuss to an clever sufficient AI, perhaps join it to a few of your techniques, and simply inform it what to do, and provides it suggestions.”
Linq ended up pivoting, and it says its buyer base has expanded by 132% from the earlier quarter, and on common its buyer accounts have expanded by 34%. Its prospects’ AI brokers now attain 134,000 month-to-month energetic customers through the platform. The corporate claims it facilitates greater than 30 million messages monthly, leading to web income retention of 295% with zero churn.
To proceed constructing its tech, the corporate mentioned on Monday it has raised $20 million in a Collection A funding spherical led by TQ Ventures. Mucker Capital and a few angel buyers additionally participated. The corporate plans to make use of the recent money to develop its crew, develop a brand new go-to-market movement, and proceed constructing its tech. Linq didn’t disclose its valuation.
Rosy outlook apart, the truth is that Linq remains to be constructing on high of Apple’s platform — a minimum of for now. There’s no telling if Apple will pull a Meta and bar third events from providing AI chatbots on its platform. Apart from, iMessage is common within the U.S., however the remainder of the world additionally makes use of different messaging providers like WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, and Sign.
Potter, nevertheless, says Linq’s eventual aim lies past messaging. “Our imaginative and prescient for the platform is all the pieces that you must construct conversational tech, and that’s not restricted to some channels. Proper now, now we have programmatic voice, now we have iMessage, RCS, SMS. That’s only the start. Our ambition is, wherever your prospects are, you need to be capable of discuss to them, be it Slack, be it e mail, be it Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Sign, wherever your prospects are, and may converse.”
“By making AI-to-human communication as frictionless as texting a buddy, Linq is enabling a wholly new class of firms,” Andrew Marks, co-founding accomplice of TQ Ventures, mentioned in an announcement. “Linq’s founding crew is extraordinary, and now we have little doubt of their capacity to execute on this huge alternative.”
