Birmingham Startup Linq Secures $20M Series A Funding for AI Communication Layer
Birmingham, Alabama is not supposed to be where the future of AI communication clicks into place. It is supposed to be quiet, polite, and a little underestimated. That misread is exactly where Linq learned to operate. Founded in 2019 by Elliott Potter, Patrick Sullivan, and Jared Mattsson, three former Shipt operators who watched a $550 million exit up close, Linq has always been about removing friction. First from networking, then from workflows, and now from how AI actually reaches people without asking them to download yet another app they will delete by Friday.
Linq started life as a digital business card and CRM automation play built on QR codes and NFC. It was clean, useful, and early. It also was not the final form. The founders kept pulling the thread until February 2025, when Linq launched a native iMessage API and the whole thing snapped into focus. Blue bubbles. Real phone numbers. No wrappers. No detours. Just AI agents talking to humans where humans already live. When Poke, built by Interaction Company of California, went viral in September 2025 on Linq’s rails, the inbound did not feel like hype. It felt like relief.
Linq closed a $20 million Series A led by TQ Ventures, with Mucker Capital returning and angels including a former Apple executive leaning in. Total funding now sits at $22.5 million. The timing matters. Within eight months of launching iMessage, Linq doubled the annual recurring revenue it built over four years. Net revenue retention is 295 percent. Customer churn is zero. The platform now moves more than 30 million messages a month across 134,000 monthly active users, with over 100 customers including Poke, Tomo, and Hypercard. The company projects billions of messages by the end of 2026, and that projection reads less like bravado and more like math.
The product is the connective tissue. Linq is the communication layer for AI agents, spanning iMessage, RCS, SMS, and voice, with full native feature parity and carrier-level integration. It is built for scale, SOC 2 Type II certified, and reportedly 90 percent cheaper than legacy communication APIs that were never designed for autonomous agents. Elliott Potter talks about app fatigue the way Don Draper talked about cigarettes. You do not need to convince people to want it. You just stop making them work so hard to get it.
Patrick Sullivan brings the engineering scar tissue from building and scaling Shipt’s original apps. Jared Mattsson carries the growth and brand spine. David Berk, who joined as Chief Operating Officer in August 2024 after leadership runs at Apple, Shipt, and Fetch, brings the discipline of companies that survive success. Investors like Andrew Marks at TQ Ventures and Omar Hamoui at Mucker Capital are not betting on a feature. They are betting on a Linq that keeps shortening the distance between intent and action.