Venture capitalists are betting that a barrage of AI agents will soon arrive and upend the marketplaces for e-commerce and payments.
Most of the action today is in building the infrastructure and tools for the day when agents can be trusted with a customer’s credit card and shopping choices. How close we are to that day is one of several very big questions facing the nascent AI commerce industry.
Our upcoming Machine Earning AI Summit will explore agentic commerce, intelligent money, enterprise finance operations, the evolving consumer and shopping experience, and the major meta-themes including fraud, risk, compliance, and security. The summit will be held on September 29 in San Francisco.
Read on for a story and a market map examining a subset of the companies who are working on agentic shopping, smart payments, and the next-gen infrastructure rails that will power transactions.
This year saw a big surge in consumers using AI in some fashion to shop for goods. A survey by Adobe Analytics found that 41% of respondents used AI for online shopping in June — a number that includes simple searches with Google’s built-in AI or ChatGPT. Around 53% of shoppers said they trust AI as a recommender as much as they trust brand websites, per an April survey conducted by Retail Dive and the commerce analytics platform Rithum.
Mark Grace, an investor at M13 who’s focused on fintech and blockchain deals, said he has noticed consumer use of AI commerce tools accelerate significantly this summer. Early adopters can now find shopping agents that “can actually go and transact on your behalf,” he told us. “I think people have become more comfortable with outsourcing some of those tasks.”
Forerunner managing partner Kirsten Green (pictured above) said in a text exchange that it’s still too soon to see hard data points on how much agentic shopping has taken off, but that anecdotally more consumers feel they’re willing to trust AI tools.
There are several categories of startups that aim to help AI agents be smart shoppers and securely make payments. We’ve broken them down into five buckets below.
Multipurpose Personal Agents
Personal agents like Instinct and Town promise to perform a range of tasks including scheduling appointments and sending emails. Shopping is also a key component. Early users reported Instinct landing dinner reservations for popular restaurants and movie tickets to special-format screenings of The Odyssey.
These personal assistants, both of which recently closed big funding rounds, are still prone to errors that have given people pause. An Instinct customer on X wrote that his agent canceled his flight without sharing that there would be hardly any refund, costing him around $300. Issues like these will certainly have to be figured out before regular consumers trust an agent with their credit card information.
Shopping Assistants
The AI shopping assistants more directly aid consumers in discovering new products from retailers, rather than having an agent spend money for them. One way to do that is through retail partnerships: Julie Bornstein’s startup Daydream, a personalized AI shopping search engine, started embedding into its clients’ websites at the end of July, so now shoppers can use the search function directly on the website to shop for that specific retailer’s catalog. Investors in Daydream include Forerunner, Index Ventures, GV, and True Ventures.
One investor we spoke with remains bearish on AI shopping agents, despite the category picking up with early power users. Shopping is something people enjoy in their free time, and e-commerce is still just a portion of the global commerce market, the investor said, so consumers will continue to choose to individually shop offline.
There’s another cautionary tale in Phoebe Gates’ shopping assistant Phia, which uses AI to find deals on online purchases. It’s been embroiled in a cookie-stuffing scandal, where it claimed referrals to certain partners that it didn’t actually earn. Phia has raised around $43 million to date, and counts Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, and Notable Capital among its backers.
Marketing Tech
New types of AI-powered marketing technology are another opportunity. Venerable search-engine optimization (SEO) approaches are now being challenged by GEO — or generative engine optimization. Profound, a buzzy startup in this space, raised $96 million in Series C funding earlier this year, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Evantic, Saga Ventures, and South Park Commons all participating.
Smart Payments
There’s also the business of making all of these agent-led payments run smoothly. Smart payments startups like Catena Labs are setting up the banking infrastructure for AI agents by giving them digital identification to match them with the person on the other side who wants a transaction to go through. Another startup doing similar work is Basis Theory, which helps agents make payments by creating secure short-term virtual cards for agents to use for added security.
Agents buying on behalf of enterprises has excited many VCs but hasn’t had as much traction yet: Many large businesses are still too concerned about the risk from compliance failures or security breaches, said Grace.
Infrastructure
Agentic commerce is still a rounding error today, but a lot is happening behind the scenes to develop the necessary infrastructure and technical protocols to make it all work. OpenAI and Stripe have launched a framework called Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP). Google owns and operates the Agent Payments Protocol, which can integrate with several other systems for agents to purchase products online. Visa and Mastercard also run systems called Trusted Agent Protocol and Agent Pay, respectively, to integrate AI purchasing into traditional financial services.
The protocols themselves are somewhat unsettled: Instant Checkout, the first consumer product built on ACP, launched in September 2025 but was pulled back in March, with OpenAI saying it would let merchants use their own checkout while it focused on product discovery.
Meanwhile, Stripe is building underlying infrastructure for agents to make purchases online through stablecoins, while Ramp launched AI agents to handle routine business procurement and fraud detection.
We compiled a list of over 35 startups building AI agents for consumer shopping, smart payments for businesses and customers, GEO and agent marketing tools, and agent financial infrastructure to keep on your radar, along with their notable backers. It’s based on our own research and conversations with investors in the space and focuses on earlier-stage companies.