A decade of quiet work, stubborn belief, and the conviction that physical-to-digital would eventually matter. This is our story.
From the archives
The Founder
Raghu, somewhere debugging
Photo coming soon
First Orders
Early packaging days
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Press & Features
Media coverage
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LINQS began when NFC in India was basically invisible. Not "new". Invisible. Phone makers often skipped NFC to save a dollar or two. The logic was brutal and circular: no use-cases, so no chip. No chip, so no use-cases. The ecosystem didn't exist, because the ecosystem didn't exist. We still started. Because the idea felt inevitable—a physical thing should be able to trigger a digital action instantly.
Apple Pay gave NFC mainstream mindshare. Not because Apple "solved" NFC, but because it made "tap" feel normal to the world. That single cultural shift mattered. It made NFC feel real, even for people who never said the word "NFC". We took it as a signal. The market would wake up. Eventually.
India got trained at scale. UPI arrived, and demonetization accelerated digital payments. The Paytm QR wave did something bigger than payments—it taught behavior: scan, confirm, move on. It taught both customers and merchants that a small marker in the physical world can start a digital journey. QR wasn't NFC. But it created the mental model that NFC needed.
iPhone support expanded beyond payments toward reading real-world tags more naturally, including background tag reading. That's when NFC tags stopped being a niche demo and became a normal interaction for a much larger set of users. Android had supported NFC for years. But iPhone is what pushed it into everyday expectation.
Contactless wasn't just a gadget feature anymore. It started showing up as public infrastructure. Metro and mobility systems began moving toward contactless. The ecosystem was finally forming around the behavior we believed in: quick, low-friction interactions in the real world. This is when it stopped feeling like we were "early". It started feeling like we were simply right.
COVID turned "contactless" from a feature into a preference, almost overnight. People didn't want to touch shared surfaces. QR became even more common. Tap became more acceptable. The idea of "touchless by design" went mainstream. For years, we had to explain why this mattered. Suddenly we didn't.
India has seen a real explosion of physical-to-digital behavior. Payment confirmations became ambient through soundboxes. Metro ticketing and transit experiences went contactless. UPI kept evolving—not just as QR, but toward tap experiences.
This is the arc we bet on in 2014. Not a gadget trend. A shift in how people behave.
We weren't early for the trend.
We were early for the inevitable.
We chose the name LINQS because we were building links for the physical world.
In the digital world, you click a hyperlink and a new identity opens up—a page, a profile, a checkout, a story. We believed the physical world would need the same thing. That you would use your smartphone to "click" physical objects, and instantly open their digital identity. Their digital alter ego.
That's what an NFC tag or a QR code really is. A hyperlink you can stick, embed, or print.
Before we were selling tags, we were using them ourselves. We were building products on top of the same NFC and QR tech. So we learned the hard parts early: what fails in the field, what survives heat and handling, what feels instant and what feels broken.
That's why we care so much about quality. Not because it sounds nice, but because we've been on the receiving end. We've shipped experiences where one bad tag can ruin the whole moment.
LINQS is part of a wider family of products that all share the same core idea: a physical thing should open a useful digital experience instantly.
Digital business cards that turn a tap into a professional introduction.
Review and reputation tools that turn a tap into customer action.
Lost-and-found experiences that help items find their way back.
Physical-to-digital notebooks and memories.
Each of these brands is powered by the same backbone: NFC and QR as real-world hyperlinks.
"A tap or a scan, and something useful opens instantly.
Even now, it feels a bit like magic."
What keeps us going
LINQS exists because we needed these building blocks ourselves. We stayed in it when it was niche, and we kept improving because our own products depended on it.
So when you buy from LINQS, you're not buying from a reseller who discovered NFC last week. You're buying from people who have been building with it for years, and who still care about the one thing that matters: when someone taps or scans, it should just work.
Browse our catalog or reach out for custom requirements.
— The LINQS Team
