Sapiom Secures $15M Seed Funding to Build Financial Infrastructure for Autonomous AI Agents

Sapiom, a startup developing financial infrastructure for AI agents, has closed a $15 million seed round led by Accel, with participation from Okta Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Array Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, and Coinbase Ventures. The company aims to solve a critical bottleneck in AI agent deployment: enabling autonomous purchasing and integration of third-party services.

As no-code and low-code platforms enable non-technical users to build custom applications through natural language prompts, a significant challenge remains in connecting these applications to external services. Tasks such as SMS delivery via Twilio, email processing, or payment handling through Stripe currently require manual service registration, authentication configuration, and API key management—barriers that limit production deployment for citizen developers.

Ilan Zerbib, former Director of Engineering for Payments at Shopify, founded Sapiom to address this infrastructure gap. The platform creates a financial layer that enables AI agents to autonomously discover, purchase, and authenticate access to software services, APIs, datasets, and compute resources without human intervention.

"Every API call is essentially a payment transaction," explained Amit Kumar, Partner at Accel. "Whether it's sending an SMS, provisioning AWS infrastructure, or accessing a data service—each interaction requires authentication and micro-payment processing. Currently, there's no seamless mechanism for agents to handle this autonomously."

Sapiom's architecture abstracts the complexity of service procurement and authentication. In practical terms, when a user builds an application with SMS functionality on platforms like Lovable or Bolt, Sapiom handles the entire backend workflow:

• Automatic service provider registration (e.g., Twilio)
• Secure credential management and API authentication
• Usage-based billing with pass-through pricing
• Real-time provisioning without manual configuration

While Sapiom's initial focus targets B2B enterprise solutions, the underlying technology has potential applications in consumer AI agents. The long-term vision includes enabling personal AI assistants to execute autonomous financial transactions—from ride-hailing services to e-commerce purchases—though Zerbib emphasizes that enterprise infrastructure represents the more immediate market opportunity.

Kumar noted that Accel evaluated dozens of startups in the AI payments ecosystem before leading Sapiom's round. The firm's conviction stems from Zerbib's focus on enterprise financial infrastructure rather than consumer payment rails—a strategic positioning that aligns with the current maturity level of agentic AI systems.

The seed funding will accelerate platform development and partnerships with vibe-coding platforms and AI agent frameworks that require seamless service integration capabilities.