Sometimes, you might 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 landing on an idea last year: helping businesses better communicate with their customers by upgrading from SMS (text) to iMessage and RCS.

Now, Apple allows businesses to do this through its Messages for Business service, and Twilio has built an $18.26 billion business by helping companies text their customers. But users can always tell when they’re talking to a business — texts are displayed in gray, and branding is always clear.

Linq customers want to be able to send blue bubble messages to their customers, not green or gray, to give an air of reliability to their communications.

The startup, founded by former Shipt executives Elliott Potter (CEO), Patrick Sullivan (CTO), and Jared Mattsson (president), heard that feedback and launched an API in February 2025 that allows companies to message their customers within iMessage, using all the capabilities that Apple’s platform offers to iPhone users, such as group chats, emojis, embedded responses, images, and voice notes. Within eight months, Linq doubled the annual recurring revenue it had built over four years, Potter told TechCrunch.

Linq is not content with its new found product market fit, however, as the advent of AI agents gives the company a larger market to sell its technology. That idea was sparked by an AI assistant called Tapakthat can manage tasks, answer questions, and schedule your calendar from within iMessage.

“In the spring of last year, this company came to us, called Interaction Company in California, and they built this AI assistant called poke.com and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t have a CRM, but we really want to use your API’,” Potter told TechCrunch.

Tapak went viral at the launch last September, which, Potter says, led to his team being flooded with requests for tapping into their messaging API. Suddenly, a slew of AI companies want to offer their chatbots and assistants directly via iMessage, RCS, and SMS.

Linq now has a decision to make: stick to its original, steady revenue stream from serving B2B clients, or pivot again to leverage its tech stack and become an infrastructure layer for a new segment of the AI ​​market.

“We still love our sales customers, and we love that use case, but our choices are, do we stay talking in this wheel, or do we build the hub? Do we focus on being the infrastructure layer for all these different programmatic messaging applications?”

Potter thinks consumers are suffering from app fatigue; but with Linq’s technology, there is no need to use another app to interact with AI assistants because they can all live within their messaging app. Also, developers don’t have to worry about building an app because they can just build for a messaging-native interface instead.

“Poke.com, along with others, is proving that AI is getting good enough,” Potter said. “You don’t need a traditional app to do things anymore. In fact, you need an interface that allows you to talk to an intelligent AI, maybe connect it to some of your systems, and just tell it what to do, and give it feedback.

Linq ended up pivoting, and it said its customer base grew 132% from the previous quarter, and its average customer accounts grew 34%. Its customers’ AI agents now reach 134,000 monthly active users through the platform. The company claims that it facilitates more than 30 million messages per month, resulting in retention of net revenue of 295% with zero churn.

To continue building its technology, the company said Monday it has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by TQ Ventures. Mucker Capital and several angel investors also participated. The company plans to use the fresh money to expand its team, make a new move in the market, and continue building its technology. Linq did not disclose its valuation.

Rosy outlook aside, the reality is that Linq is still built on top of Apple’s platform – at least for now. No word on whether Apple wants to drag a Meta and prevent third parties from offering AI chatbots on its platform. Besides, iMessage is popular in the US, but the rest of the world also uses other messaging services like WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, and Signal.

Potter, however, says Linq’s ultimate goal goes beyond messaging. “Our vision for the platform is everything you need to build a tech conversation, and that’s not limited to certain channels. Now, we have programmatic voice, we have iMessage, RCS, SMS. That’s just the beginning. Our ambition is, wherever your customers are, you need to talk to them, whether it’s Slack, whether it’s email, whether it’s Telegram, WhatsApp, can talk to your customers.”

“By making AI-to-human communication as seamless as texting a friend, Linq is enabling a new category of companies,” said Andrew Marks, co-founder of TQ Ventures, in a statement. “The founding team at Linq is exceptional, and we have no doubt in their ability to execute on this tremendous opportunity.”