Top AI Product

Remember the last time you downloaded a new app? If you’re like most people, it probably involved groaning at the storage space warning, watching a progress bar crawl across your screen, and then promptly forgetting the app existed after one use. We’ve all hit peak app fatigue, and the team at Linq thinks they have the antidote.

This Birmingham, Alabama-based startup just announced a fresh $20 million Series A round led by TQ Ventures on February 2nd, and the timing couldn’t be more interesting. While everyone else is busy building yet another AI app you’ll never open, Linq is quietly becoming the infrastructure layer that lets AI assistants live exactly where you already spend your time — inside iMessage, RCS, and SMS.

The story of how Linq got here is almost too perfect to be true. The company started as a digital business card tool, pivoted a few times, and then stumbled into something much bigger. In February 2025, they launched an API that let businesses send actual blue-bubble iMessages instead of the corporate gray ones that scream “this is automated.” Within eight months, they had doubled the revenue they’d spent four years building. Not bad for a pivot.

But the real magic happened when a company called Poke came knocking. They were building an AI assistant that could schedule your calendar, answer questions, and handle tasks entirely within iMessage — and they desperately needed Linq’s API to make it work. When Poke went viral last September, suddenly every AI company wanted the same thing. Linq’s team got flooded with requests.

CEO Elliott Potter, who co-founded the company alongside former Shipt colleagues Patrick Sullivan and Jared Mattsson, faced a choice. Stick with the steady B2B revenue they knew, or go all-in on becoming the plumbing for a new wave of AI agents. They chose the latter, and the numbers suggest they made the right call. Customer growth shot up 132% quarter-over-quarter. Net revenue retention hit a staggering 295% with zero churn. Today, their platform handles more than 30 million messages every month, reaching 134,000 active users.

The pitch is disarmingly simple. Instead of building an app and praying people download it, AI companies can just plug into Linq and instantly reach anyone with a phone number. Users get blue bubbles, typing indicators, group chats, voice notes, emoji reactions — all the iMessage features they already know. Developers get to skip the app store approval hellscape entirely. And because Linq routes messages through iMessage and RCS rather than old-school SMS, it’s reportedly 90% cheaper than traditional business messaging APIs.

Potter’s thesis is that AI has finally gotten good enough to make apps optional. “You don’t need a traditional app anymore to do things,” he told TechCrunch. “Really, you just need an interface that will let you talk to an intelligent enough AI.”

There’s obviously some platform risk here — building on Apple’s infrastructure means playing by Apple’s rules, and iMessage’s dominance varies wildly by geography. But Linq’s ambitions extend far beyond blue bubbles. They’re already supporting programmatic voice, and Potter talks openly about adding Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, and email to the mix. The end goal is letting companies reach customers wherever they already communicate.

Whether Linq becomes the default infrastructure layer for conversational AI or gets squeezed by bigger players remains to be seen. But with $20 million in fresh funding, former Shipt executives at the helm, and a zero-churn customer base that’s tripling their message volume, they’ve certainly got the wind at their backs. Sometimes the smartest move isn’t building something new — it’s making everything else fit into what people already use.