For twenty years, the internet economy has been designed for humans. We built interfaces for human eyes, authentication for human devices, and financial, fraud, and risk models that assume a person is present to sign up, manage credentials, and approve spend.
Economic activity is shifting from human-to-business to machine-to-business. Agents will go beyond simply chat UIs and will start to act. They’ll provision compute, purchase data, call paid APIs, and coordinate complex workflows.
Read More – Accrual Raises $75M in Funding
Today, I’m excited to announce Sapiom, and share that we’ve raised a $15.75M Seed round, led by Accel, with participation from Gradient, Array Ventures, Okta Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, Coinbase Ventures, Formus Capital, and Operator Collective.
We are joined by strategic angels from Shopify, OpenAI, Vercel, GitHub, Circle, and Mercury – operators who deeply understand payments, infrastructure, and where AI is headed next.
We’re building Sapiom on a simple premise: AI agents are already capable of doing real work, but they’re blocked from accessing the real economy.
Intelligence without Access
Over the last decade, billions have gone into scaling model intelligence, and almost zero into scaling access.
And yet, the agentic era cannot progress until AI agents can autonomously access and operate across real-world systems and services.
The result is a paradox: Agents are brilliant, but powerless.
Today, AI agents can write code, but they cannot buy the infrastructure to run it. They can plan a marketing campaign, but they cannot pay for the SMS API to send it. They can design a landing page, but they cannot pay for the image generation to populate it. And they can build an app with user accounts, but they cannot provision the authentication service to secure it.
Sapiom gives AI agents trusted access to the API economy
Money is the universal API key.
If an agent can safely spend, it can access anything – compute, data, inference, messaging, and the long tail of specialized services – without waiting for pre-built integrations or vendor-by-vendor onboarding.
Sapiom is making that possible today. We turn spend into a developer primitive, something software can do safely under policy – like any other call in the stack. We abstract the complexity of identity (KYA), wallets, policy enforcement, risk controls, metering, billing and multi-rails settlement behind a single integration.
Each transaction through Sapiom creates verifiable context – agent identity, policy, vendor, and outcome – that strengthens controls and risk management as usage grows. That feedback loop is what makes autonomous systems scalable and trustworthy for enterprises.
Every shift in commerce requires new primitives
I’ve spent the last decade operating at the bleeding edge of the current financial stack – first as a founder at Earny (acquired in 2021), then at Shopify, where I spent nearly five years leading engineering in payments, scaling Shop Pay to over $100B in GMV and building Shop Cash from the ground up.
That experience taught me a fundamental lesson: you can’t force infrastructure built for one era to serve the next.
We spent years optimizing the card-not-present stack for humans, but as AI agents began to emerge, it became obvious that human-centric rails would never support machine-centric commerce.
History is consistent: every generational shift in commerce requires a new infrastructure layer.
- In-Person Commerce needed plastic cards (Visa/Mastercard).
- Internet Commerce needed developer payment APIs (Stripe).
- Machine Commerce needs a way for software to spend across the API economy
AI agents aren’t just software – they are becoming economic actors. They will provision infrastructure, negotiate with vendors, allocate capital, and operate continuously across trillions of dollars in activity. That future cannot run on rails built for humans clicking “Buy”.
It requires trusted access to the API economy: a layer that makes machine spend programmable, safe, and scalable. That’s what we’re building.
Building the Machine-Native future
The shift to machine commerce is happening now. In the near future, software will negotiate, procure, and settle value at a scale that dwarfs human commerce.
Read More – Fundamental Raises $255M in Series A Funding
