Sapiom raises $15M to build a financial layer for AI agents

Sapiom, a San Francisco-based startup, has raised $15 million in a seed round—an early-stage funding round—led by Accel, a venture capital firm. The startup is developing a financial layer designed to allow artificial intelligence agents to securely purchase and access software, APIs, data, and compute. Founded last summer by Ilan Zerbib, who previously spent five years as Shopify’s director of engineering for payments, Sapiom aims to create a payment system that lets AI automatically buy the services it needs. Other investors participating in the early-stage round include Okta Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Array Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, and Coinbase Ventures.

The startup’s technology aims to solve infrastructure barriers for nontechnical creators who build custom applications using “vibe coding”—the process of building custom apps using plain-language descriptions. While vibe-coding platforms like Lovable or Bolt allow users to easily generate code, launching these applications into production often requires connecting to external services, such as Twilio for sending text messages or AWS for server hosting. Currently, setting up these integrations requires manual authentication and payment setup. Sapiom plans to handle these transactions in the background, allowing the vibe-coding platform to charge the creator a pass-through fee. Amit Kumar, a partner at Accel, highlighted the necessity of this infrastructure, stating: “If you really think about it, every API call is a payment. 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 noted that while apps will consume services requiring payments in the future, there is currently no easy way for agents to access them.

While Sapiom is currently focused on business-to-business (B2B) solutions, its technology could eventually empower personal AI agents to handle consumer transactions. In the future, individuals might trust AI agents to make independent financial decisions, such as ordering rides on Uber or shopping on Amazon. However, the company is prioritizing the business infrastructure layer first, as automating these micro-payments for software and services represents the most immediate technical hurdle for autonomous AI operations.

Why it matters

Sapiom is building a financial layer for AI agents to automate payments for software, APIs, and compute, aiming to remove infrastructure barriers for nontechnical creators. This infrastructure is intended to allow AI agents to operate autonomously without human intervention for service purchases.