Sometimes, you might be sitting on a hot product and not know it until the market demands it.
After launching as a digital business card that doubled as a lead capture tool for sales teams, Birmingham, Alabama-based Linq pivoted a few times before landing on an idea last year: helping businesses better communicate with their customers by upgrading from SMS (text) to iMessage and RCS.
Now, Apple already lets businesses do this via its Messages for Business service, and Twilio has built an $18.26 billion business by helping companies text their customers. But users can always tell when they’re talking to a business — the texts are displayed in gray, and the branding is often obvious.
Linq’s customers wanted to be able to send blue-bubble messages to their customers, not green or gray, to lend an air of authenticity to their communications.
The startup, founded by former Shipt executives Elliott Potter (CEO), Patrick Sullivan (CTO), and Jared Mattsson (president), heard that feedback and launched an API in February 2025 that lets companies message their customers natively within iMessage, leveraging all the capabilities Apple’s platform offers to iPhone users, like group chats, emojis, threaded replies, images, and voice notes. Within eight months, Linq had doubled its annual recurring revenue it had built over four years, Potter told TechCrunch.
Linq was not content with its newfound product-market fit, however, as the advent of AI agents gave the company an even larger market to sell its tech to. That idea was sparked by an AI assistant called Poke, which can handle tasks, answer questions, and schedule your calendar from inside iMessage.
“In spring of last year, this company came to us, called the Interaction Company of California, and they were building this AI assistant called poke.com and they were like, ‘Hey, we we don’t have a CRM, but we really want to use your API’,” Potter told TechCrunch.
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Poke went viral at launch last September, which, Potter says, led to his team being inundated with requests for tapping their messaging API. All of a sudden, a slew of AI companies wanted to offer their chatbots and assistants directly through iMessage, RCS, and SMS.
Linq now had a decision to make: stick with its original, steady revenue stream from serving B2B clients, or pivot once 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 stay 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 that consumers are suffering from app fatigue; but with Linq’s technology, there’s no need to use another app to interact with AI assistants as they can all live within their messaging app. Also, developers won’t have to worry about building an app since they can just build for a messaging-native interface instead.
“Poke.com, along with others, have proved that AI has gotten good enough,” Potter said. “You don’t need a traditional app anymore to do things. Really, you just need an interface that will let you 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 ended up pivoting, and it says its customer base has expanded by 132% from the previous quarter, and on average its customer accounts have expanded by 34%. Its customers’ AI agents now reach 134,000 monthly active users via the platform. The company claims it facilitates more than 30 million messages per month, resulting in net revenue retention of 295% with zero churn.
To continue building its tech, the company said on 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 fresh cash to expand its team, develop a new go-to-market motion, and continue building its tech. Linq did not disclose its valuation.
Rosy outlook aside, the reality is that Linq is still building on top of Apple’s platform — at least for now. There’s no telling if Apple will pull a Meta and bar third parties from offering AI chatbots on its platform. Besides, iMessage is popular in the U.S., but the rest of the world also uses other messaging services like WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, and Signal.
Potter, however, says Linq’s eventual goal lies beyond messaging. “Our vision for the platform is everything you need to build conversational tech, 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, wherever your customers are, you should be able to talk to them, be it Slack, be it email, be it Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Signal, anywhere your customers are, and can converse.”
“By making AI-to-human communication as frictionless as texting a friend, Linq is enabling an entirely new category of companies,” Andrew Marks, co-founding partner of TQ Ventures, said in a statement. “Linq’s founding team is extraordinary, and we have no doubt in their ability to execute on this massive opportunity.”
