Tech
Linq raises $20M to enable AI assistants to live within messaging apps
Sometimes, you might be sitting on a hot product and not know 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 a few 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 already lets businesses do this via 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 — the texts are displayed in gray, and the branding is often obvious.
Linq’s customers wanted to be able to send blue-bubble messages to their customers, not green or gray, to lend an air of authenticity 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 lets companies message their customers natively within iMessage, leveraging all the capabilities Apple’s platform offers to iPhone users, like group chats, emojis, threaded replies, images, and voice notes. Within eight months, Linq had doubled its annual recurring revenue it had built over four years, Potter told TechCrunch.
Linq was not content with its newfound product-market fit, however, as the advent of AI agents gave the company an even larger market to sell its tech to. That idea was sparked by an AI assistant called Poke, which can handle tasks, answer questions, and schedule your calendar from inside iMessage.
“In spring of last year, this company came to us, called the Interaction Company of California, and they were building this AI assistant called poke.com and they were like, ‘Hey, we we don’t have a CRM, but we really want to use your API’,” Potter told TechCrunch.
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Poke went viral at launch last September, which, Potter says, led to his team being inundated with requests for tapping their messaging API. All of a sudden, a slew 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, steady revenue stream from serving B2B clients, or pivot once 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 were, do we stay a spoke of this wheel, or do we build the hub? Do we focus on being the infrastructure layer for all these different applications of programmatic messaging?”
Potter thinks that consumers are suffering from app fatigue; but with Linq’s technology, there’s no need to use another app to interact with AI assistants as they can all live within their messaging app. Also, developers won’t have to worry about building an app since they can just build for a messaging-native interface instead.
“Poke.com, along with others, have proved that AI has gotten good enough,” Potter said. “You don’t need a traditional app anymore to do things. Really, you just need an interface that will let you talk to an intelligent enough 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 says its customer base has expanded by 132% from the previous quarter, and on average its customer accounts have expanded by 34%. Its customers’ AI agents now reach 134,000 monthly active users via the platform. The company claims it facilitates more than 30 million messages per month, resulting in net revenue retention of 295% with zero churn.
To continue building its tech, the company said on 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 fresh cash to expand its team, develop a new go-to-market motion, and continue building its tech. Linq did not disclose its valuation.
Rosy outlook aside, the reality is that Linq is still building on top of Apple’s platform — at least for now. There’s no telling if Apple will pull a Meta and bar third parties from offering AI chatbots on its platform. Besides, iMessage is popular in the U.S., but the rest of the world also uses other messaging services like WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, and Signal.
Potter, however, says Linq’s eventual goal lies beyond messaging. “Our vision for the platform is everything you need to build conversational tech, and that’s not limited to a few channels. Right now, we have programmatic voice, we have iMessage, RCS, SMS. That’s just the beginning. Our ambition is, wherever your customers are, you should be able to talk to them, be it Slack, be it email, be it Telegram, WhatsApp, Discord, Signal, anywhere your customers are, and can converse.”
“By making AI-to-human communication as frictionless as texting a friend, Linq is enabling an entirely new category of companies,” Andrew Marks, co-founding partner of TQ Ventures, said in a statement. “Linq’s founding team is extraordinary, and we have no doubt in their ability to execute on this massive opportunity.”
Tech
Peak XV says internal disagreement led to partner exits as it doubles down on AI
Peak XV Partners, a leading venture capital firm in India and Southeast Asia, has seen a fresh round of senior departures. These follow other leadership exits over the past year as it pushes ahead with plans to deepen its focus on AI investing and expand its footprint in the U.S., while keeping India as its largest market.
The latest departures stem from an internal disagreement with senior partner Ashish Agrawal (pictured above, left) that led to a mutual decision to part ways, Managing Director Shailendra Singh told TechCrunch. He added that two other partners, Ishaan Mittal (pictured above, right) and Tejeshwi Sharma (pictured above, center), chose to leave alongside him.
Singh said Peak XV did not want to go into the specifics of the disagreement and was focused on moving forward. “Just out of privacy, and out of, like, trying to be classy about it,” he said. Singh added that such departures were not uncommon at large, multi-stage venture firms and that Peak XV wanted to move on quickly after several years of working together.
All board seats held by the departing partners would be transitioned “imminently,” Singh said, noting that the firm already had overlapping representation across several portfolio companies. He said Peak XV was not concerned about continuity, noting that multiple general partners and operating partners were already involved across many of those boards.
The departures mark the exit of long-tenured investors from the firm. Agrawal had been with Peak XV for more than 13 years, while Mittal spent over nine years at the firm and Sharma more than seven years, per their LinkedIn profiles.
Agrawal wrote in a LinkedIn post that he had decided to “take the entrepreneurial plunge” and was teaming up with Mittal and Sharma to start a new venture capital firm. He described the move as an opportunity to build a new institution with longtime partners and thanked Peak XV’s leadership for what he called a “truly wonderful partnership.”
During his time at Peak XV, Agrawal led investments across fintech, consumer, and software, including Groww, one of the firm’s most prominent IPO exits in 2025. He also backed multiple early- and growth-stage companies alongside Mittal and Sharma, contributing to Peak XV’s broader portfolio build-out over the past decade.
Agrawal, Mittal, and Sharma did not respond to messages for comments.
Peak XV has also moved to strengthen its senior leadership from within. The firm on Tuesday promoted Abhishek Mohan to general partner, expanding its investment leadership bench, while Saipriya Sarangan was elevated to chief operating officer, taking charge of firm-wide operations.
The leadership changes come amid a standout year for Peak XV’s portfolio exits. Five of its companies — Groww, Pine Labs, Meesho, Wakefit, and Capillary Technologies — went public in November and December 2025, generating roughly ₹300 billion (around $3.33 billion) in unrealized, mark-to-market gains for the firm, in addition to about ₹28 billion (about $310.61 million) in realized gains from share sales during the IPOs.
In addition to the latest departures, Peak XV has seen a broader churn in its senior ranks over the past 12 months. Last year, long-time investment leaders Harshjit Sethi and Shailesh Lakhani exited the India team, while Abheek Anand and Pieter Kemps departed from the firm’s Southeast Asia operations. The firm has also seen leadership changes across its marketing, policy, and operations teams in recent months.
Singh dismissed a view circulating in the market that many of the partners who drove Peak XV’s largest exits were no longer at the firm, calling the narrative “not statistically true.” He said several of the firm’s most significant outcomes had been led by long-tenured partners who remained at Peak XV, and argued that the firm’s exit track record did not hinge on any single individual.
Peak XV currently has seven general partners, along with multiple partners and principals, according to Singh.
The VC firm, which split from Sequoia Capital in 2023 and currently manages over $10 billion in capital across 16 funds, has made about 80 investments linked to AI, Singh said, highlighting its push to deepen its focus on AI funding. It is also preparing to open a U.S. office within the next 90 days as it expands its global footprint, per Singh, while continuing to view India as its largest and most important market.
Singh stated the firm believed AI would reshape venture investing more profoundly than previous technology shifts, arguing that successful AI investing required investors with deep technical understanding rather than “generalist” experience. He added that Peak XV was looking to add more AI-native talent, including researchers and engineers with backgrounds in machine learning and large-scale model development.
The firm has invested in more than 400 companies, and its portfolio has seen over 35 initial public offerings and several M&As to date.
Tech
PayPal hires HP’s Enrique Lores as its new CEO
PayPal said on Tuesday it is hiring HP’s Enrique Lores as its CEO and president, replacing current chief executive Alex Chriss. Lores, who has been the chair of PayPal’s board since July 2024, will also take up the role of president.
PayPal said the appointment was made because the company’s pace of change and execution was “not in line with the Board’s expectations” given broader market trends.
Chriss joined PayPal in September 2023 from Intuit, succeeding Dan Schulman. PayPal’s CFO and COO, Jamie Miller, will take over as interim CEO until Lores joins the company.
The appointment comes as PayPal on Tuesday reported lower than expected revenue and profit in the fourth quarter, as consumer spending dipped amid a broader cost of living crisis and a softening labor market. The company also forecast a dip in its full-year profit, which surprised investors, as Wall Street had broadly expected the company to forecast growth instead.
PayPal’s shares were down about 17.9% in premarket trading on Tuesday.
Lores, who served as president and CEO of HP for over six years, said that apart from product innovation, PayPal will hold itself accountable for delivering quarterly accounts.
“The payments industry is changing faster than ever, driven by new technologies, evolving regulations, an increasingly competitive landscape, and the rapid acceleration of AI that is reshaping commerce daily. PayPal sits at the center of this change, and I look forward to leading the team to accelerate the delivery of new innovations and to shape the future of digital payments and commerce,” Lores said in a statement.
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Tech
Fitbit founders launch AI platform to help families monitor their health
Fitbit founders James Park and Eric Friedman have announced the launch of a new AI startup called Luffu that aims to help families proactively monitor their health. The duo are developing an “intelligent family care system” that will start with an app experience and then expand into hardware devices.
Two years after their exit from Google, Park and Friedman are betting on AI to help lighten the mental burden of caregiving. According to a recent report, 63 million, or nearly 1 in 4, U.S. adults are family caregivers, up 45% from 10 years ago.
Luffu uses AI in the background to gather and organize family information, learn day-to-day patterns, and flag notable changes so families can stay aligned and address potential well-being issues.
“At Fitbit, we focused on personal health—but after Fitbit, health for me became bigger than just thinking about myself,” Park said in a press release. “I was caring for my parents from across the country, trying to piece together my mom’s health care across various portals and providers, with a language barrier that made it hard to get complete, timely context from her about doctor visits. I didn’t want to constantly check in, and she didn’t want to feel monitored. Luffu is the product we wished existed—to stay on top of our family’s health, know what changed and when to step in—without hovering.”

The pair note that today’s consumer health market is filled with tools for individuals, but that real life health is shared across partners, kids, parents, pets, and caregivers. Family information is scattered across devices, portals, calendars, attachments, spreadsheets, and paper documents.
With Luffu, people will be able to track the whole family’s details, including health stats, diet, medications, symptoms, lab tests, doctor visits, and more. Users can log health information using voice, text, or photos. Luffu proactively watches for changes, and surfaces insights and alerts, such as unusual vitals or changes in sleep.
The pair told Axios that people can ask questions using plain language to ask about their family’s health, such as “Is Dad’s new meal plan affecting his blood pressure?” or “Did someone give the dog his medication?”
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“We designed Luffu to capture the details as life happens, keep family members updated and surface what matters at the right time—so caregiving feels more coordinated and less chaotic,” Friedman said in the press release.
People who are interested in Luffu can join the waitlist for the limited public beta.
