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 to iMessage and RCS.
Apple already lets businesses do this via its Messages for Business service, and Twilio has built a large business by helping companies text their customers. But users can always tell when they’re talking to a business, as the texts are displayed in gray with obvious branding. Linq’s customers, however, wanted 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, Patrick Sullivan, and Jared Mattsson, heard that feedback and launched an API in February 2025. This API lets companies message their customers natively within iMessage, leveraging all the capabilities Apple’s platform offers, like group chats, emojis, threaded replies, images, and voice notes. Within eight months, Linq had doubled the annual recurring revenue it had built over four years.
Linq was not content with its newfound product-market fit, however. 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. This was a key catalyst in the company’s refocusing on the agentic market.
In spring of last year, the company behind Poke approached Linq. They wanted to use Linq’s API despite not having a CRM. When Poke went viral at launch last September, Linq’s team was inundated with requests from AI companies wanting to offer their chatbots and assistants directly through iMessage, RCS, and SMS.
Linq then had a decision to make: stick with its original, steady revenue stream from serving B2B clients, or pivot again to leverage its tech stack and become an infrastructure layer for a new segment of the AI market. The choice was between staying a spoke of the wheel or building the hub to become the infrastructure layer for all these different applications of programmatic messaging.
Potter believes consumers are suffering from app fatigue. With Linq’s technology, there’s no need to use another app to interact with AI assistants, as they can all live within a messaging app. Developers also won’t have to worry about building an app, since they can just build for a messaging-native interface instead. AI has gotten good enough that you don’t need a traditional app anymore; you just need an interface to talk to an intelligent AI connected to your systems.
Linq ended up pivoting. 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 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 for now. There’s no telling if Apple will bar third parties from offering AI chatbots on its platform. Besides, iMessage is popular in the U.S., but the rest of the world uses other messaging services like WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, and Signal.
Potter, however, says Linq’s eventual goal lies beyond messaging. The vision for the platform is everything you need to build conversational tech, and that’s not limited to a few channels. Currently, they have programmatic voice, iMessage, RCS, and SMS, but that’s just the beginning. The ambition is to enable communication wherever customers are, be it Slack, email, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Signal, or anywhere else.
By making AI-to-human communication as frictionless as texting a friend, Linq is enabling an entirely new category of companies. Linq’s founding team is extraordinary, and there is no doubt in their ability to execute on this massive opportunity.