AI agents are about to get their own credit cards. Sapiom, a startup founded by former Shopify payments director Ilan Zerbib, just closed a $15 million seed round led by Accel to build the financial infrastructure that lets AI agents autonomously purchase software, APIs, and compute resources. The timing couldn't be better - as vibe-coding tools like Lovable turn plain-language prompts into working apps, there's no easy way for those AI-built applications to handle the authentication and micro-payments required every time they ping an external service.
Sapiom is tackling one of the messiest problems in the AI agent revolution - how do autonomous systems actually pay for things? The answer matters more than you'd think. Every time an AI agent needs to send a text via Twilio, spin up a server on AWS, or pull data from an API, there's a payment lurking underneath. Right now, humans have to manually set up accounts, enter credit card details, and copy API keys. It's a workflow that completely breaks the promise of autonomous AI.
That's the infrastructure gap Zerbib spotted after spending five years running payments engineering at Shopify. He launched Sapiom last summer with a focused thesis - build the financial layer that enterprises actually need, not the flashy consumer wallet that VCs keep pushing. The bet paid off. Accel just led a $15 million seed round, joined by Okta Ventures, Array Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, and Coinbase Ventures, according to TechCrunch.
"If you really think about it, every API call is a payment," Amit Kumar, partner at Accel, told TechCrunch. "Every time you send a text message, it's a payment. Every time you spin up a server for AWS, it's a payment." Kumar screened dozens of AI payment startups before backing Sapiom, convinced that Zerbib's enterprise-first approach is what makes autonomous agents viable at scale.
