Daniel Tian
Co-founder
Photon
According to TechCrunch, Daniel Tian built a bot that texted his friends back as him over iMessage. When he and Ryan Zhu open-sourced the technology on GitHub, thousands of developers adopted it. Tian is now co-founder and CEO of Photon, which helps developers build agents that work over iMessage and WhatsApp.
Shipping Apps as Students
Tian and Zhu, Photon's CTO, spent their student years building consumer apps, often at hackathons. Every time they finished an app, they hit the same bottleneck: getting people to discover it. An agent inside Apple's Messages could reach people through an app they already use every day.
Once the bot took off, they went all in. Tian dropped out of UPenn's M&T program. Zhu left high school and later became a visiting student at MIT's Media Lab.
Connecting Agents to iMessage With Spectrum
Spectrum is an open-source SDK and cloud platform that connects agents to iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord and other messaging apps, according to Photon's launch post.
"We started Photon because a friend could not tell our agent from a person in his own iMessage thread, and that told us where agents actually belong," Tian told Tech Funding News. Photon raised $4.5 million in seed funding co-led by Gradient and A*, with Vercel, HongShan and others joining.
On September 17 in San Francisco, California, Photon held an "app funeral" for mobile apps, complete with a coffin for app icons. The company says it has signed up over 40,000 developers.
