A Birmingham, Alabama startup just cracked the code on making AI assistants feel less like bots and more like friends. Linq closed a $20 million Series A led by TQ Ventures to power AI agents that live natively inside iMessage, RCS, and SMS - sending blue bubbles instead of corporate gray ones. The pivot came after AI assistant Poke went viral last September using Linq's infrastructure, triggering a flood of requests from AI companies wanting to ditch standalone apps. Now the former digital business card company is betting everything on becoming the infrastructure layer for conversational AI, and the numbers suggest they're onto something big.
Linq didn't set out to revolutionize AI distribution. The Birmingham startup launched as a digital business card and lead capture tool for sales teams, pivoting multiple times before stumbling into product-market fit in February 2025 with a deceptively simple idea - help businesses send blue bubble iMessage texts instead of the gray ones that scream "corporate automation."
Within eight months, the company doubled the annual recurring revenue it had painstakingly built over four years. Then Poke changed everything.
Last spring, the Interaction Company of California approached Linq with an unusual request. They were building an AI assistant called Poke that could handle tasks, answer questions, and manage calendars entirely within iMessage - but they didn't have a CRM and desperately needed Linq's API. "They were like, 'Hey, we don't have a CRM, but we really want to use your API,'" CEO Elliott Potter told TechCrunch.
When Poke went viral at launch last September, Linq's team got slammed with similar requests. AI companies wanted to offer chatbots and assistants directly through iMessage, RCS, and SMS - no app downloads required. The startup faced a fork in the road: stick with steady B2B sales revenue or pivot again to become infrastructure for a nascent AI category.
