Photon held a funeral for mobile apps; plus, Kevin Mandia’s new ‘agent swarm’ security startup

This is TechCrunch. This episode is brought to you by Framer. You know what's absolutely terrifying? A bad website. Or worse, one that doesn't work. Avoid that nightmare and use Framer. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. So I was new to this whole website building thing, but Framer helped me get set up and running incredibly fast. For instance, I wanted to add a blog to my website. It was super easy. Starting with a basic blog page template, I added some breakpoints and then jumped into customizing my layout, adding my own special touches with Framer's intuitive tools, and bam! I was ready to start letting my thoughts flow. See why thousands are trusting Framer to help build their websites. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash tcstartups for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash tcstartups. Rules and restrictions may apply. The AI startup Photon is so sure that agents will eventually come to replace mobile apps that it held a funeral for them. Yes, a real funeral in a church with speeches and everything. Photon, which helps developers build agents that work over iMessage and WhatsApp, now has $4.5 million in seed funding to develop its products. The raise comes after the company signed up over 40,000 developers and grew its revenue 10x in just four months, it says. Photon co-founder and CEO Daniel Tian said the app funeral held in San Francisco on September 17th was also a developer day for the startup, featuring panels from Vercel, Stripe, and OpenAI. It also included an actual coffin for app icons. The move to host an app funeral was obviously somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but Tian believes the app era is coming to an end, saying, Honestly, it's going to take a while, but I think directionally it's inevitable. Now, the thesis behind the startup, as you may have guessed, is that users no longer want to install new apps. Instead, they want access to agents that work through the messaging apps they already use, like iMessage and WhatsApp. Meta's Muse, whose app has soared to number one on the app stores, is putting that theory to the test. But even if Muse comes to dominate the consumer AI space, TNC's a market for serving developers who want their applications to work over messaging services. That's why Photon is offering a package of tools, including a unified API, an extensible channel framework, a command line interface, and an observability suite. Combined, they allow developers to build and operate an agent experience that works over iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS or RCS, email, voice, and more. The idea for Photon emerged from the time co-founders Tian and Ryan Zhu, the CTO, spent building consumer apps as students, often at hackathons. Every time they finished a new app, they hit the same bottleneck, getting people to discover it. By building an agent that worked with iMessage, they realized they could reach people through an app those