Linq raises $20M to enable AI assistants to live within messaging apps

Sometimes, you mightiness beryllium sitting connected a blistery merchandise and not cognize it until the marketplace demands it.

After launching arsenic a integer concern paper that doubled arsenic a pb seizure instrumentality for income teams, Birmingham, Alabama-based Linq pivoted a fewer times earlier landing connected an thought past year: helping businesses amended pass with their customers by upgrading from SMS (text) to iMessage and RCS.

Now, Apple already lets businesses bash this via its Messages for Business service, and Twilio has built a $18.26 cardinal concern by helping companies substance their customers. But users tin ever archer erstwhile they’re talking to a concern — the texts are displayed successful gray, and the branding is often obvious.

Linq’s customers, though, wanted to beryllium capable to nonstop blue-bubble messages to their customers, not greenish oregon gray, to lend an aerial of authenticity to their communications.

The startup, founded by erstwhile Shipt executives Elliott Potter (CEO), Patrick Sullivan (CTO), and Jared Mattsson (President), heard that feedback and launched an API successful February 2025 that lets companies connection their customers natively wrong iMessage, leveraging each the capabilities Apple’s level offers to iPhone users, similar radical chats, emojis, threaded replies, images and dependable notes. Within 8 months, Linq had doubled its yearly recurring gross it had built implicit 4 years, co-founder and CEO Elliott Potter told TechCrunch.

Linq was not contented with its newfound product-market-fit, however, arsenic the advent of AI agents gave the institution an adjacent larger marketplace to merchantability its tech to. That thought was sparked by an AI adjunct called Poke that tin grip tasks, reply questions, and docket your calendar from wrong iMessage was a cardinal catalyst successful the company’s refocusing connected the agentic market.

“In outpouring of past year, this institution came to us, called the Interaction Company of California, and they were gathering this AI adjunct called poke.com and they were like, ‘Hey, we we don’t person a CRM, but we truly privation to usage your API’,” Potter told TechCrunch.

Poke went viral astatine motorboat past September, which, Potter says, led to his squad being inundated with requests for tapping their messaging API. All of a sudden, a slew of AI companies wanted to connection their chatbots and assistants straight done iMessage, RCS, and SMS.

Linq present had a determination to make: instrumentality with its original, dependable gross watercourse from serving B2B clients, oregon pivot erstwhile again to leverage its tech stack and go an infrastructure furniture for a caller conception of the AI market.

“We inactive emotion our income customers, and we emotion that usage case, but our choices were, bash we enactment a spoke of this wheel, oregon bash we physique the hub? Do we absorption connected being the infrastructure furniture for each these antithetic applications of programmatic messaging?”