Linq raises $20M to help AI agents live inside messaging apps

Sometimes, you can sit on a hot item and not know it until the market demands it.

After launching as a digital business card that doubled as a tool for leading sales teams, Birmingham, Alabama-based Linq they voted several times before arriving at the idea last year: to help businesses communicate better with their customers by upgrading from SMS (voice) to iMessage and RCS.

Now, Apple already allows businesses to do this through Business Messaging, and Twilio has built an $18.26 billion business by helping companies send messages to their customers. But users can always tell when they are talking to a business – the text is displayed in gray, and the logo is often visible.

Linq’s customers, however, wanted to be able to send blue messages to their clients, not green or gray, to provide authentication for their communications.

The startup, founded by former Shipt executives Elliott Potter (CEO), Patrick Sullivan (CTO), and Jared Mattsson (President), felt the same and launched an API in February 2025 that allows companies to send messages to their customers naturally within iMessage, using all the power that the Apple platform offers to iPhone users, such as group chats, emojis, thread responses, images and text messages. In eight months, Linq doubled the annual revenue it generated in four years, co-founder and CEO Elliott Potter told TechCrunch.

Linq was not satisfied with its newly acquired products, however, the arrival of AI assistants gave the company a larger market to sell its technology. That idea was introduced by an AI assistant called Poka that can work, answer questions, and organize your calendar from within iMessage was a big help in the company’s review of the advertising market.

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

Poka went viral at launch last September, which, Potter says, led to his team being bombarded with requests to tweak their messaging API. Suddenly, several AI companies wanted to provide chatbots and their assistants directly via iMessage, RCS, and SMS.

Linq now had a choice to make: stick to its original, traditional way of making money from serving B2B customers, or change to expand its technical capabilities and become a catalyst for a new segment of the AI ​​market.

“We still love our retail customers, and we love the way they use it, but our choices were, do we keep talking about this wheel, or do we build the place?

Potter thinks consumers are suffering from app fatigue; but with Linq technology, there is no need to use another app to communicate with the AI ​​agents as they can all be within their messaging app. Also, developers will not have to worry about building the app because they can just build it for messaging-native features instead.

“Poke.com, along with others, have proven that AI has gotten better,” Potter said. “You don’t even need traditional software to do things. In fact, you just need an interface that allows you to talk to intelligent AI, maybe communicate with your machine, and just tell it what to do, and it’ll respond.”

Linq ended up impressing, saying its customer base grew 132% from the previous quarter, and its average customer accounts grew 34%. Its AI-assisted clients now reach 134,000 monthly users through the platform. The company claims to handle more than 30 million messages per month, resulting in saving all money 295% with zero churn.

To continue developing its technology, the company said Monday it raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by TQ Ventures. Mucker Capital and angel investors participated. The company plans to use the new funding to expand its team, develop a new sales channel, and continue to develop its technology. Linq did not disclose its calculations.

Optimism aside, the truth is that Linq is still building on top of Apple’s platform – for now. There’s no telling if Apple will drag Meta and prohibit third parties from providing AI chatbots on its platform. After all, iMessage is popular in the US, but the rest of the world also uses other messaging apps such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, and Signal.

Potter, however, says that Linq’s ultimate goal is not just to send messages. “Our vision on the platform is everything you need to create communication skills, and this is not limited to a few channels. At the moment, we have program words, we have iMessage, RCS, SMS. This is just the beginning. Our goal is that, wherever your customers are, you must communicate with them, be it Slack, be it email, be it your customers, Whatsapp, Signal, Disco, wherever your customers are.”

“By making AI-human interactions as easy as texting a friend, Linq is enabling a new class of companies,” Andrew Marks, co-founder of TQ Ventures, said in a statement. “The team behind Linq is amazing, and we have no doubt that they are ready to take advantage of this great opportunity.”