Linq raises $20 million to enable AI assistants to live inside messaging apps

Sometimes, you may be sitting on a hot 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, Birmingham, Alabama-based Linq pivoted several times before coming up with an idea last year: helping businesses better communicate with their customers by upgrading from SMS to iMessage and RCS.

Now, Apple already allows companies to do this via its business messaging service, and Twilio has built an $18.26 billion business by helping companies send text messages to their customers. But users can always tell when they’re talking to a company — texts are displayed in gray, and the branding is often clear.

Linq customers wanted to be able to send blue bubble messages to their customers, not green or grey, to add an air of authenticity to their communications.

The startup, founded by former Shipt executives Elliot Potter (CEO), Patrick Sullivan (CTO), and Jared Mattson (President), heard that feedback and launched an API in February 2025 that allows businesses to message their customers natively via iMessage, taking advantage of all the capabilities Apple’s platform offers iPhone users, such as group chats, emoji, threaded replies, photos, and voice notes. Within eight months, Linq doubled its annual recurring revenue over four years, Potter told TechCrunch.

Linq was not satisfied with the market fit of its new products, as the emergence of AI agents gave the company a larger market to sell its technology to. This idea was brought forward by an AI assistant called Poke, which can handle tasks, answer questions, and schedule your calendar from within iMessage.

“Last spring, this company came to us, called Interaction Company of California, and they were building this 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.

Poke went viral when it launched last September, which, Potter says, led to his team being inundated with requests to leverage their messaging API. Suddenly, a plethora 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, established revenue stream of B2B customer service, or focus again on leveraging its technology stack and becoming an infrastructure layer for a new segment of the AI ​​market.

“We still love our sales customers, and we love this use case, but our choices were, do we remain the hub of this wheel, or do we build the center? Do we focus on being the infrastructure layer for all these different automated messaging applications?”

Potter believes consumers are suffering from app fatigue; But with Linq, there is no need to use another app to interact with AI assistants as they can all live inside their own messaging app. Also, developers won’t have to worry about creating an app as they can just create a native messaging interface instead.

“Poke.com, along with other sites, has proven that AI is good enough,” Potter said. “You no longer need a traditional app to do things. In fact, you just need an interface that lets you talk to an AI that’s smart enough, and maybe connect it to some of your systems, tell it what to do, and give it feedback.”

Linq ended up pivoting, and says its customer base expanded 132% from the previous quarter, and on average its customer accounts expanded 34%. Its customer AI agents now reach 134,000 monthly active users across the platform. The company claims to facilitate over 30 million messages per month, keeping net revenue at 295% unchanged.

To continue building 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 funds to expand its team, develop a new go-to-market movement, and continue building its technology. Linq did not disclose its rating.

Regardless of the rosy outlook, the reality is that Linq is still based on the Apple platform – at least for now. There’s no indication if Apple will pull Meta and block third parties from offering AI-powered chatbots on its platform. Besides, iMessage is very popular in the United States, but the rest of the world also uses other messaging services such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, and Signal.

However, Potter says Link’s ultimate goal lies behind the messages. “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 and SMS. This is just the beginning. Our ambition is that wherever your customers are, you should be able to talk to them, whether it’s via Slack, via email, Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord or Signal, wherever your customers are, they can talk.”

“By making AI-human communication as easy as sending a text message to a friend, Linq enables a whole new class of companies,” Andrew Marks, co-founder of TQ Ventures, said in a statement. “Linq’s founding team is exceptional, and we have no doubt in their ability to execute on this tremendous opportunity.”