Chert

Businesses that want to reach customers through text messaging are often stuck with SMS sent through providers like Twilio, which is carrier-filtered, 10DLC-registered, and visibly automated to recipients. This hurts open and reply rates and risks spam flags, since A2P SMS inherits carrier-side filtering that throttles bulk senders. Companies want the trust and familiarity of iMessage's blue-bubble experience, which lives in the same inbox as a customer's family and friends, but iMessage has not been programmable or accessible at scale for business use cases like onboarding, support, or scheduling.

Chert provides infrastructure to send and receive real iMessage conversations over Apple's iMessage protocol via a REST API and webhooks, rather than SMS rebranded as iMessage. Messages arrive as native blue-bubble threads from verified numbers, with read receipts, tapbacks, typing indicators, and support for attachments like PDFs, voice notes, and contact cards. Threads can include multiple named recipients with clean handoffs, and the system falls back to SMS or RCS when a contact is not reachable on iMessage, surfacing which channel was used in the API. To protect deliverability, Chert rotates and gradually warms sending identities and caps volume per identity per day, and it ships native sync for common events like lead creation, meeting booked, and opt-out received, or will handle integration during onboarding.