Daniel Tian

Daniel Tian is co-founder of Photon, the San Francisco company behind Spectrum, a framework for running agents over iMessage, WhatsApp, and other messaging channels. He co-founded the company with Ryan Zhu after both spent early years building consumer apps at hackathons and repeatedly hitting discovery walls. TechCrunch reports Tian left UPenn's M&T program to build Photon.

Hackathon apps and the discovery wall

Tian and Zhu kept shipping consumer apps as students and kept hitting the same bottleneck: getting anyone to install them. Their answer was to put the agent inside Apple Messages and other threads people already open.

Spectrum as the channel layer

Photon's public thesis is that agents should travel through messaging identity, receipts, and habits rather than another icon. Spectrum exposes providers for iMessage, WhatsApp Business, Telegram, Slack, and more, with a hosted path for harder credentials.