October 15, 2026

Happy Friday Photon Community,

This week at Photon: WE LAUNCHED PHOTON 2.0 with $100 in credits for every builder, partnered with TinyFish and Render on new technical guides, opened new roles on the team, and are on our Photon Hacks University tour!

Announcements

Photon Launch: PHOTON 2.0!

Photon 2.0 is here: one API to bring your agent to iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS, RCS, email, and voice, now in public beta with $100 in free credit.

• A faster iMessage engine. It’s rebuilt from the ground up, about 1.6x faster, with roughly 100 ms latency.

• Every channel, one API. It’s built on simple Users, Spaces, and Messages, and each channel keeps its native features.

• A redesigned dashboard. It adds line health, logs, and traces, plus voice calling and US SMS registration. Start building

Read Details

Announcements

Photon Contest: Make Your Own Muse on iMessage

We’re giving away $3,000 to whoever makes the best Muse of their own: build a personal agent that lives in iMessage, powered by Photon.

• Three $1,000 prizes: the Most Time-Saving Muse, the Most Unhinged Muse, and the Most Inspiring Muse.

• How to enter: build your agent on Photon, post a demo and your message history on X tagging @PhotonHQ, then submit the Typeform.

• Deadline: October 19. Let’s see your Photon agent become our next muse! Enter here

Read Details

Build With Photon

Photon x Tinyfish: Live Lead Research

Photon partnered with TinyFish to bring live lead research into iMessage, so your agent knows who you’re texting within five seconds of opening a thread.

• Know who’s texting. Role, company, and socials appear right in the thread, with a ready-to-send opener.

• One tap for more. Get a sourced brief that tells apart people with the same name.

• Context that travels. Research stays with the lead, even across phones and teammates. Read the blog

Read Details

Build With Photon

Photon x Render: Codex Template Deployment

Photon teamed up with Render on a one-click template for a private Codex agent you text from your iPhone over iMessage.

• Live in ~10 minutes. Deploy from Render’s template, with no terminal, Mac server, or Apple ID needed.

• Private by default. Only your number can reach the agent, and long tasks survive restarts.

• About $3-5/month on Render, plus your Photon plan. Read the guide

Read Blog

Community Highlights

College Hackathons: Photon Sponsoring

Last weekend, Photon sponsored 2 Hackathons: University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Hacklanta! Over 80+ projects were submitted in the weekend alone!

• Photon will be at HackHarvard at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachussets from 10/16-10/18 for the Hack to the Moon Photon Agent Track!

• Photon will be at LA Hack's AI Fall Hackathon at UCLA along with LA Tech Week events from 10/17-10/18 for the Photon agent Track!

• Photon will be at DubHacks in Washington from 10/17-10/18, co-sponsoring the Agent Dev Track!

That's all for this week.

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

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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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