Linq raises $20 million to bring AI assistants to life in messaging apps | TechCrunch

Sometimes you might be sitting on a popular product and not know about it until the market demands it.

After launching as a digital business card that doubled as a lead capture tool for sales teams based in Birmingham, Alabama Linq had a few spins before it came up with an idea last year: help companies communicate better with their customers by upgrading from SMS (text) to iMessage and RCS.

Now Apple already lets companies do this through its Messages for Business service, and Twilio has built an $18.26 billion business helping companies text their customers. But users can always tell when they are talking to a company: the texts are grayed out and the branding is often clearly visible.

However, Linq’s customers wanted to be able to send blue bubble messages to their customers, and not green or gray, to give their communications an air of authenticity.

The startup, founded by former Shipt executives Elliott Potter (CEO), Patrick Sullivan (CTO), and Jared Mattsson (President), heard that feedback and in February 2025 launched an API that allows companies to send their customers native messages within iMessage, taking advantage of all the capabilities that Apple’s platform offers to iPhone users, such as group chats, emojis, threaded replies, images and voice memos. Within eight months, Linq had doubled the annual recurring revenue it had built over four years, co-founder and CEO Elliott Potter told TechCrunch.

However, Linq was not satisfied with the new product market fit, as the arrival of AI agents gave the company an even larger market to sell its technology to. That idea was sparked by a called AI assistant Por which can handle tasks, answer questions and plan your calendar from iMessage, was an important catalyst in the company’s refocus on the agent market.

“In the spring of last year, this company came to us called the Interaction Company of California, and they were building an AI assistant called poke.com and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t have a CRM, but we really want to use your API,’” Potter told TechCrunch.

Por went viral at launch last September, which Potter says led to his team being inundated with requests to use their messaging API. Suddenly, a slew of AI companies wanted to offer their chatbots and assistants directly via iMessage, RCS, and SMS.

Linq now had a decision to make: stick with its original, steady revenue stream from serving B2B customers, or pivot again to leverage its tech stack and become an infrastructure layer for a new segment of the AI ​​market.

“We still love our sales customers, and we love that use case, but our choices were: Do we continue to be a spoke of this wheel, or do we build the hub? Do we focus on being the infrastructure layer for all these different applications of programmatic messaging?”

Potter thinks consumers are suffering from app fatigue; but with Linq’s technology, there’s no need to use another app to communicate with AI assistants because they can all live within their messaging app. Furthermore, developers don’t have to worry about building an app because they can just build a messaging-native interface instead.

“Poke.com, along with others, has proven that AI has become good enough,” said Potter. “You don’t need a traditional app to do things anymore. Basically, all you need is an interface that allows you to talk to an intelligent enough AI, maybe connect it to some of your systems, and just tell it what to do, and give it feedback.”

Linq ultimately turned around and says its customer base grew 132% from the previous quarter, and its customer accounts grew an average of 34%. Its customers’ AI agents now reach 134,000 active users monthly through the platform. The company claims it facilitates more than 30 million messages per month, resulting in 295% net revenue retention with no churn.

To further build out its technology, the company said Monday it has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by TQ Ventures. Mucker Capital and some angel investors also participated. The company plans to use the new money to expand its team, develop a new go-to-market movement and continue developing its technology. Linq has not disclosed its valuation.

Beyond the rosy outlook, the reality is that Linq is still building on Apple’s platform – at least for now. There’s no telling whether Apple will revoke a Meta and ban third parties from offering AI chatbots on its platform. Moreover, iMessage is popular in the US, but the rest of the world also uses other messaging services such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram and Signal.

However, Potter says Linq’s ultimate goal goes beyond just messaging. “Our vision for the platform is everything you need to build conversational technology, and that’s not limited to a few channels. Right now we have programmatic voice, we have iMessage, RCS, SMS. That’s just the beginning. Our ambition is that wherever your customers are, you should be able to talk to them, whether it’s Slack, whether it’s email, whether it’s Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Signal, wherever your customers are, and talk.”

“By making AI-to-human communications as frictionless as texting a friend, Linq is enabling an entirely new category of business,” said Andrew Marks, co-founder of TQ Ventures, in a statement. “The Linq founding team is extraordinary, and we have no doubt they can capitalize on this enormous opportunity.”