Firmly raises $15 million to connect shops to AI agents
Seattle's Firmly raised $15 million so shops can sell through AI agents and stay merchant of record. Ask Agent adds in-chat checkout on the retailer's own site.
A $15 million Series A is a small sum beside the programs card networks already run for AI agents, and that gap is what Firmly is trying to fill. Having tracked agent checkout from card-network pilots through to merchant fraud checks, the scarce asset is the retailer's permission to open its catalog and its till.
On November 5, 2026, the Seattle company said Squarepoint Capital led a round with J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard and Samsung NEXT, and it launched Ask Agent for a shop's own site. GeekWire put funding after the round at about $20 million. The company publishes that account at firmly.ai.
PYMNTS, working from the November 5 release, describes Ask Agent as a conversational shop added with a single line of JavaScript. Shoppers describe an item in ordinary language, see recommendations from the live catalog, price and inventory, and can check out inside the chat. Firmly says early deployments showed conversion-rate gains of up to 18% and average-order-value gains of up to 23%. Those percentages are company claims, and the release leaves the sample and the window unnamed.
Kumar Senthil, co-founder and chief executive, put the engineering load in the round note GeekWire quoted.
Every new AI assistant, marketplace or shopping platform is another place to sell. But connecting to each one can take serious engineering, because catalogs, inventory, payments, and checkout all have to work together.
PYMNTS, citing the release, places the product between a browser agent that clicks through checkout and a structured interface that returns a live price and a confirmed order. citybiz relayed the company's separate claim that the pipe can reach more than 11 million merchants representing more than $900 billion in gross merchandise volume.
The shop stays merchant of record on the order
The release, as PYMNTS renders it, says Firmly Connect plugs into the commerce stack the merchant already runs and shows catalog, product pages and checkout to each destination through one connection. The merchant remains merchant of record on every order and keeps its payment provider, its customer relationships and its transaction data. A marketplace, a social network or a publisher integrates once, keeps the audience, and leaves the sale with the shop.
Firmly connects to the retailer's systems with permission, rather than sending software to click through the pages, so a purchase can finish inside an assistant while the retailer keeps its payment provider, GeekWire reported. Senthil told Axios Pro, in that account, that Mastercard is recruiting merchants for Agent Connect, the September service linking merchants, AI agents and payment providers, and that Firmly handles the merchant side. He told Axios the fee runs from $2,000 to $15,000 a month, scaled to merchandise sold, and that a connection which took four to six weeks in 2024 now takes a day or less, including testing.
GeekWire lists Best Buy, Furniture.com and Backcountry among retail customers, and says RetailMeNot and an AI shopping app called Wizard also use the technology. On the release's terms, a channel on that pipe can offer the purchase while the named shop remains merchant of record, so the platform hands back a live catalog and a live checkout instead of standing as the seller.
Card networks are already writing the agent rules
Mastercard is both investor and commercial partner, which is the distribution a round of this size can buy. Visa has taken agentic payments live with 30 European issuers, and Adyen has pushed its own agentic checkout into a protocol contest. PYMNTS names Google's Universal Commerce Protocol beside Agent Connect as standards still being adopted. Firmly's wager is that merchants will pay a specialist to speak those dialects while their own payment provider stays on the order.
GeekWire also records the opposing camp, in which software browses the storefront itself. Meta's Muse assistant can browse retail sites and buy with a user's approval, Amazon has blocked Muse, and Amazon is suing Perplexity over a shopping agent in the Comet browser. Firmly assumes the store has agreed, then books the order to the merchant. Fraud checks on AI-agent checkout remain a separate layer, because an allowed channel still has to decide which agent may spend.
Where the Series A is meant to land next
The company told the release that the capital goes to more merchants and more destinations, including AI agents, marketplaces, social networks and shoppable advertising. GeekWire records $5.2 million raised by the March 2025 Perplexity partnership and states the new total at about $20 million. If Mastercard's recruiting, as Senthil described it, puts shops on Agent Connect with Firmly on the merchant side, the round works as distribution. If those shops keep the merchant-of-record role, a marketplace or a publisher on the pipe can sell the audience while tax, refunds and the customer record stay with the retailer.
Reporting by Rick Steves. Filed 9 November 2026, 12:36 GMT.
Senior Reporter, Regulation and Fintech
Rick Steves has seen business and economics through many lenses. He joined the financial services industry in 2009, and has been a financial journalist since 2011.
