July 31, 2026

Happy Friday Photon Community,

This week at Photon: a builder's Hermes agent crossed a million views for turning saved TikToks into plans, our clients fractional.engineer and pally launched agents that live in your texts, and our YC Startup School go-kart rally, yacht party, 1000 person hackathon wrapped with 10M+ views across social.

Built on Photon

Text Your Saved TikToks to Hermes, Get a Plan Back

A Uniswap builder wired up Hermes on iMessage to watch his girlfriend's thousands of saved TikToks, file them in a vault, and pull from her lists to plan the fun stuff.

• Built on Photon, running on iMessage

• She texts videos to Hermes: it watches them and stores them in a vault

• He texts the agent to pull her lists and plan day trips, restaurants, and gifts

• 1M+ views and 10k+ likes on X

Details on X

Built on Photon

fractional.engineer: Your 24/7 Engineering Assistant

Fractional Engineer team is building a personal engineering assistant called "Erling" that lives inside your messaging apps.

• Stay organized, find answers across your work, and get engineering tasks done

• Works through iMessage, Discord, and WhatsApp

Try Erling

Built on Photon

Pally: The Agent That Stops You Ghosting People

Pally lives in your texts, connects to your DMs, and replies in your tone so you stop leaving people on read.

• Sees who you've left on read and replies with your voice and context

• Escalates to you when it needs a call

• Full general agent: books flights, buys with locked one-time cards, and drives a browser

• Free month of Pro with the referral link

Try Pally

Community Highlights

YC Startup School: GoKart Rally and Yacht Party Recap

Our two biggest events of the week, the go-kart rally and the black-tie yacht party, closed out YC Startup School with backing from our partners and advisors, including Josh Constine.

• 10M+ views across social media

• One of the most successful event runs at YC Startup School and got featured by YC SUS
  
  

Check it Out on X

Community Highlights

Overnight Hackathon at Corgi HQ

We cohosted a 12-hour overnight hackathon at YC Startup School with Corgi, Merge, Vercel, and Fondo, all building around one theme: "make it feel human."

• 1,000 participants and 250+ teams over 12 hours

• Atlas: a second-brain life map that reads your Gmail, Calendar, and Drive

• Golden Retriever: an on-call AI companion built for accessibility

• Hacker House: a multiplayer lounge for builders while their agents run
  
  

Check it Out on X

We're Hiring

Backend Engineers (Intern + Fulltime)

Proficient in Swift, TypeScript (NodeJS, ConnectRPC, Hono), or Rust. Strong understanding of how production-level backend systems work, including OTel, Workflow Systems, Outbox, PostgreSQL, Service Mesh, and k8s.

Email Us 2 Apply

That's all for this week.

We believe agents should reach everyone:
And we're building every day to make it happen.

Want to learn more about Photon?
Reply to this email or grab time with us for a quick chat.

Photon is building the Twilio for AI agents - enabling agents to live inside existing messaging surfaces like iMessage, phone calls, email, WhatsApp, Instagram, Slack, and more. Our open-source kits have driven 200k+ impressions and adoption from thousands of developers.

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