In the decade I spent in payments, one thing became crystal clear: you can't force infrastructure built for one era to serve the next. In-person commerce needed plastic cards. Internet commerce needed developer payment APIs. Now, machine commerce needs something entirely different.
AI agents are already capable of doing real work. They can write code, plan campaigns, analyze data, and coordinate complex workflows. But there's a hard ceiling on what they can actually accomplish.
Meet Sapiom, which just announced its $15.75M seed round led by Accel, with participation from us at OpCo, Gradient Ventures, Array Ventures, Okta Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, Coinbase Ventures, and Formus Capital.
The Company
Sapiom gives AI agents trusted access to the API economy so they can autonomously access and operate across real-world systems and services. Founded by Ilan Zerbib, former Director of Engineering for Payments at Shopify where he scaled Shop Pay to $100B GMV, the platform turns spend into a developer primitive that AI agents can execute safely under policy. They're starting with cost observability and expanding toward full financial orchestration for autonomous agents.
Why You Should Pay Attention
Here's one major problem blocking AI-agent adoption at scale: our entire financial system assumes a person is present to sign up, manage credentials, and approve spend. Give an agent broad spend authority and you've handed it a blank check. Lock it down for safety and you've rendered it useless in production.
Sapiom makes money the universal API key. Agents can safely access compute, data, inference, messaging, and specialized services without pre-built integrations or manual vendor onboarding. Transaction-level policy enforcement removes the ceiling on AI automation while giving enterprises the governance controls they need.
The shift from human-to-business to machine-to-business commerce is happening now. Shadow AI is the number one cybersecurity concern among security professionals. Agents are becoming economic actors, and they need payment rails built for machines, not humans.
The Details
Sapiom's initial product focuses on what Ilan calls "Ramp for API Keys" - giving agents trusted access to the API economy. The developer-first platform allows users to connect their agents to a curated list of API services, such as search, inference, authentication, and content generation. Each service is accessible instantly on a pay-per-use basis through Sapiom, with authentication, payments, and billing handled behind the scenes.
With a few lines of code, businesses can set centralized, real-time usage and spend controls for API and token usage by agent and workflow, across the external services agents consume. For agent builders, this enables frictionless API service usage, with fine-grained attribution and controls that safely scale agentic utility and unlock higher-value use cases.
Sapiom’s early customers are vibe coding platforms enabling integrated services for end-user apps, enterprises deploying agent workforces at scale, and vertical AI companies embedding external services in agent workflows.
Why We're Invested
Ilan spent years scaling payment infrastructure at Shopify, building Shop Cash from zero to a platform that unlocked the Shop Cash Offers ad network. He knows how to solve immediate pain while building toward transformational opportunities. That same pattern applies here - solve urgent cost visibility problems, build trust through immediate ROI, then expand to autonomous financial orchestration.
His payments DNA, repeat founder experience (Earny was acquired in 2021), and ability to recruit top engineering talent set Sapiom apart. His founding engineers followed him from previous companies - that loyalty signals both leadership quality and product clarity. The competitive landscape is heating up, but most competitors are either conceptual or focused on billing models rather than infrastructure.
The thesis is straightforward: production AI adoption will accelerate, cost control will become mandatory, and companies will adopt Sapiom to solve immediate pain then expand as the agent economy matures.
What's Next
If you're building or deploying AI agents and want to move from pilots to production with real access, visibility, and control, reach out to partners@sapiom.ai, or to us for an introduction. The team is also hiring across engineering, product, and go-to-market at sapiom.ai/careers.
The next trillion buyers won't be human. Software is becoming the customer of the internet, and Sapiom is building the infrastructure to make that shift safe, scalable, and programmable.
