Skyfire Launches with $8.5M Funding to Enable AI Agents to Make Autonomous Payments

AI payment processing startup Skyfire launches with $8.5M in funding - SiliconANGLE

AI payment processing startup Skyfire launches with $8.5M in funding Skyfire Systems Inc., a startup with software that enables artificial intelligence models to make purchases, launched today with $8.5 million in initial funding. The investment included the participation of more than a dozen institutional backers. Among them was Ripple Labs Inc., a provider of payment processing software backed by more than $200 million in venture capital. Skyfire co-founders Amir Sarhangi and Craig DeWitt both held executive roles at Ripple before launching the startup. Advanced AI models such as GPT-4o can perform a range of tasks in third-party services, but only if those tasks don't involve making a payment. Neural networks currently lack the ability to complete purchases on users' behalf. Skyfire's namesake cloud platform is designed to address that feature gap. The platform allows AI developers to create a digital wallet for a large language model. They can then deposit funds into that wallet from a bank account or with USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar. Circle Internet Financial LLC, the developer of USDC, was among the participants in Skyfire's newly disclosed funding round. The company's AI payments platform creates an account for every neural network that developers sign up. That account allows the model to log into the third-party services in which it will make purchases. According to Skyfire, its platform stores transactions made by an AI model in an activity log that can be used to "demonstrate your agent is a good actor" to sellers. An LLM's end-users, in turn, can create budget limits to avoid overspending. If the model attempts to make a transaction that exceeds the sum at its disposal, Skyfire notifies the affected customers. "Our research indicates the market size of agent to agent commerce alone can reach $46 billion over the next three years," said Sarhangi, Skyfire's Chief Executive Officer. "We see a future where millions of AI Agents transact globally and autonomously through Skyfire." One use case that the company envisions for its platform is allowing AI models to make purchases on consumers' behalf. Chatbots such ChatGPT can perform shopping-related tasks such as helping the user find an online store that carries a particular product, but they can't order the product. Skyfire allows developers to add that capability to their AI services without building a custom payment system. There are situations where an AI can only answer user questions by drawing on information from a paid data source. A financial analyst, for example, might ask a chatbot to retrieve details about a stock from a commercial market intelligence feed. Skyfire says that its platform allows enterprise AI models to automatically purchase access to paywalled data. Skyfire-powered neural networks can likewise purchase infrastructure. If a developer asks a coding assistant to launch a program that is too complex to run locally, the neural network could rent a cloud instance and deploy the program on that machine. Skyfire says that its platform can be connected to AI models and the paid services they use in a few minutes. The company provides a software development kit to ease the integration process.

Skyfire raises $8.5m to bring autonomous payments to AI agents

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community. AI agents, which are designed to perform specific tasks, answer questions, and automate processes for users, are becoming increasingly common. However, Skyfire argues that they are limited because they cannot make or receive payments without human oversight. "AI can't truly change the world until it can transact freely. Agents need more than intelligence; they need the autonomy to complete economic tasks without human intervention. That's the AI economy," says Craig DeWitt, head of product, Skyfire. Skyfire has built an operating layer that it says delivers critical missing components for AI commerce, including secure wallet access, verifiable agent identity, and an open payment protocol for service requests, purchasing decisions, and instant transactions without human intervention. DeWitt and CEO Amir Sarhangi worked together at Ripple. Previously, Sarhangi, founded Jibe mobile, which was acquired by Google and served as the backbone of Android Messenger. Says Sarhangi: "AI Agents are a brand new customer base for businesses and a game-changing opportunity. Agentic AI commerce will surpass every payment innovation we've known, from credit cards to PayPal...We see a future where millions of AI Agents transact globally and autonomously through Skyfire, driving new revenue streams and transforming the way business is done." Funding for the venture comes from Neuberger Berman, Brevan Howard Digital, Intersection Growth Partners, DRW, Inception Capital, Arrington Capital, RedBeard Ventures, Sfermion, Circle, FBG, Gemini, Crossbeam Venture Partners, EveryRealm, Draper Associates, ARCA, and Ripple.

Skyfire launches to let autonomous AI agents spend money on your behalf

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More A new San Francisco startup, Skyfire, is launching today in beta with $8.5 million in seed round funding to become the "Visa for AI" by allowing you to equip autonomous AI agents made by other companies with your money and let them spend it while they go off on and work for you. "We're enabling is AI agents to be able to autonomously make payments, receive payments, hold balances," said Skyfire's co-founder and CEO Amir Sarhangi, in a video call interview with VentureBeat earlier this week. "Essentially, think of us as FinTech infrastructure for AI." The company's seed round was backed by Neuberger Berman, Brevan Howard Digital, Intersection Growth Partners, DRW, Inception Capital, Arrington Capital, RedBeard Ventures, Sfermion, Circle, FBG, Gemini, Crossbeam Venture Partners, EveryRealm, Draper Associates, ARCA, and Ripple. Why should we be giving AI agents money to spend on our behalf through Skyfire? Read on to find out about how Skyfire's technology works, its value proposition and how it maintains security in a fast-moving space. What Skyfire offers Skyfire claims it is offering the world's first payment network designed to support fully autonomous transactions across AI agents, large language models (LLMs), data platforms, and various service providers. This development marks a significant step toward creating a new global economy where AI agents can function as independent economic actors, capable of making and receiving payments without human intervention. "We really see that next million users for a lot of these [vendor] companies coming from AI agents being the customer," said Sarhangi. Right now, AI agents and "agentic AI" are some of the most talked about subjects in the rapidly shifting field of generative AI. Essentially, both concepts refer to the idea of letting programs powered by advanced AI models -- LLMs, small language models (SMLs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) -- perform actions on the user's behalf. Instead of you opening a spreadsheet and editing numbers or cropping a photo, an AI agent could do it on your behalf -- even without you uploading the necessary file -- as long as it was set up to have permissions to your files and accounts. But there's a big problem: if you want AI agents to do more advanced activities such as help you shop, book flights, or build new apps, services, websites, and businesses -- there's a good chance that they will come to a place where they need to pay for web hosting or some other service, and can't. That's currently where their utility ends. "The problem is that AI agents don't have identities, they don't have bank accounts, and they can't do those things because that identity and ability to have access to financial is basically not possible for them," said Sarhangi. "So that's what we're unlocking." Skyfire has set up a new, secure payments system that will allow end-users to give AI agents a set amount of money and have them spend it on their behalf. Think of giving your human assistant money to go get you coffee or telling them to use their company card. That's exactly what Skyfire is trying to do, but for non-human software. Skyfire's key features Skyfire's platform is designed to be a comprehensive financial stack for the AI economy, providing essential tools and protocols for AI Agents to operate independently. Key features include: Initially, the company is focused on reaching other AI providers and AI-based, agent builders as a B2B software provider, allowing them to integrate a payments layer into their AI agents and products. That way, if a developer wants to add the ability for their customers and end-users to load up an AI agent with money, Skyfire can help them do it -- no matter what the underlying AI model is. "There's over 160 LLMs today," Sarhangi pointed out. "So we enable a developer to be able to use any of these 160 LLMs through our through our protocol, without having to go to each one, opening up bank, you know, an account, and also having to hold balances at any of them." Craig DeWitt, co-founder and Head of Product at Skyfire, highlighted the importance of enabling AI Agents to act autonomously in the economic sphere in a statement provided via press release. "AI can't truly change the world until it can transact freely. Agents need more than intelligence; they need the autonomy to complete economic tasks without human intervention. That's the AI economy," DeWitt stated. The company will take a cut of each transaction made through its platform and also offers value-added software atop the payments layer which it charges software-as-a-service (Saas) fees for on a subscription basis. Skyfire establishes strong security through simplicity and verification The idea of letting AI agents carry and spend real peoples' money may strike some readers as worrisome and rife with security risks, by Skyfire's co-founders are confident that they have set up their system such that it is just as safe as spending money directly online. "The only thing that is required for sign up today is a user signs up with their email, and from that email, we give them a space through this open protocol to be able to fund accounts, to be able to set balances, and to be able to connect to our service providers through Skyfire," said DeWitt. "It's not like we're getting social security numbers from people." Instead, the user setting up a Skyfire account -- typically a developer -- will have the option as to which other existing payment providers they can link to, including other major financial institutions and major credit cards. Then, they or their end users can use these existing major financial institution accounts, log-ins and APIs to equip the Skyfire-powered AI agent with the amount of money chosen by the end-user. Skyfire also allows developers and their end-users to set hard limits for how much cash an AI agent can spend. And as always, it's up to the customer as to how much money to equip an agent with in the first place. In addition, Skyfire is offering among its value-added services verification for a subscription fee to users who want to be sure that the agents are acting lawfully. 'We're able to verify 'this agent is owned by who it says it is, or this person is operating an agent is who they say they are,'" said DeWitt. "There will be certain individuals and there will be certain businesses that will only transact with other participants if they've gone through that verification process. And so it's kind of a step on top of this open network." A strong track record The leadership team at Skyfire brings extensive experience in payments and technology. Before co-founding Skyfire and leading it as CEO, Sarhangi previously served as a VP of Partnerships at Ripple, where he worked on developing instant, universally accepted payment solutions. Prior to that, he founded Jibe Mobile, which was acquired by Google in 2015. DeWitt was also as an early developer at Ripple, contributing to the foundational payments technology that has become integral to the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry. Prior to that, he worked at Bloomberg on its financial products. Both Sarhangi and DeWitt have a track record of building scalable, global software and payments infrastructure, positioning Skyfire to rapidly establish itself as an industry leader. Skyfire's payment network is now open to Agentic AI developers, LLMs, and API providers, who can begin integrating the platform through the company's website, skyfire.xyz. With its innovative approach to AI commerce and strong backing from investors, Skyfire is poised to redefine the economic landscape for AI Agents and the broader AI ecosystem.

Skyfire lets AI agents spend your money | TechCrunch

There's a lot of hype about the promise of AI agents today, but payments are a huge limiting factor. Today, an AI agent might be able to plan a vacation for you independently, but a human has to step in when it's time to input your credit card information. Skyfire Systems wants to change that. Skyfire created a payment network specifically for AI agents to make autonomous transactions. Now, obviously, AI agents are hard to control today, so the idea of one tied to your bank account is terrifying. However, Skyfire uses a number of safeguards to prevent AI agents from overspending, making the whole thing a little less scary. Skyfire assigns each AI agent a digital wallet with a unique identifier, where businesses can deposit a set amount of funds they want the agent to spend, so they don't get unlimited access to a bank account. Skyfire also allows customers to set limits in how much an AI agent can spend in one transaction and over time. If an AI agent tries to overspend, it will ping a human to review it. Skyfire also offers a dashboard to view exactly how much, and where, their agent is spending. Skyfire's co-founder and CEO Amir Sarhangi sold his last startup, Jibe, to Google, and the RCS messaging protocol Jibe helped pioneer became the standard for Android's billion users. Now, he's trying to develop an open protocol to power payments in the AI era. "AI agents can't do anything if they can't make payments, it's just a glorified search," said Skyfire co-founder and Chief Product Officer Craig DeWitt in an interview with TechCrunch. "Either we figure out a way where agents are actually able to do things, or they don't do anything, and therefore, they're not agents." On Wednesday, Skyfire officially launched its payment network and announced $8.5 million in seed funding raised from Neuberger Berman, Inception Capital, Arrington Capital, and other investors. (Arrington Capital is led by Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, who left the publication in 2011.) Notably, Skyfire doesn't build the AI agents, but plenty of companies already are: they're all trying to make sure agents don't go rogue and send 4,000 printers to the office when the old one runs out of ink (ideally, just one). Even though Skyfire has added safeguards, the founders say that aligning AI agents to act responsibly is ultimately up to the companies behind them. Skyfire is solely focused on creating the payments network these agents can transact on, and did it using blockchain technology. The founders were early executives at the cryptocurrency startup Ripple, helping to build a cross border payments network that processed more than $50 billion during their time there. Businesses can deposit and withdraw US dollars from Skyfire, but under the hood, the platform is converting those dollars into a digital stablecoin. Skyfire uses USDC, a digital stablecoin pegged to the American dollar's value, and holds it in a wallet tied to that agent. Skyfire collects 2% to 3% of every transaction to generate revenue, but says verification services could be another source of revenue moving forward. As AI companies struggle to generate returns on expensive models, it's possible more will turn to payments as a means to break even. In a beta test over the last two months, some AI agents have already been spending their companies' dollars with Skyfire, the founders tell TechCrunch. Denso, a global auto parts manufacturer, created AI agents to source materials without the help of humans. These systems could find the materials Denso wanted to buy, but required humans to step in at the end of the month and conduct a wire payment. Now, Skyfire enables Denso's AI agents to work truly autonomously. Another company already using Skyfire is Payman, which allows AI to pay humans for various tasks, kind of like Fiverr. With Skyfire's platform, Payman's AI agents can now hire and fulfill payments to contract workers completely autonomously, at least in theory. For now, Skyfire is focused on B2B use cases for its payments network. But Skyfire's CEO says that's just the beginning. "The protocol we built will be an open protocol that any company, even a competitor, can use," said Sarhangi in an interview. "We want this to be the thing everybody uses when it comes to payments in the AI world." Skyfire's founders believe AI agents will fundamentally shift the way things are purchased on the internet. To buy something online today, humans fill out lots of personal information and select images of traffic cones to verify your identity. Skyfire hopes its payments network makes the interface obsolete, and your AI agent can one day just act as a secure intermediary between vendors and your bank account.

Crypto Payment Network for AI Agents Launched by Former Ripple Execs - Decrypt

AI systems can do many things: conjure images and videos, write treatises, synthesize terabytes of information, and even replicate human speech patterns and emulate emotions. But one thing they cannot yet do, as simple as it sounds, is pay for anything. Two former Ripple developers now seek to eliminate that barrier by fusing blockchain payments with AI to bring forth what they believe will soon emerge as a new chapter for both technologies. Their novel service, an open-source payment system called Skyfire, will allow autonomous AI agents to zip around the internet, purchasing whatever goods they need to complete assigned missions -- everything from data storage and creative assets to airfare and groceries. All such transactions will be powered by USDC, the popular stablecoin. The company, which today announced an $8.5 million seed raise, is backed by crypto heavy hitters, including Circle -- the issuer of USDC -- Ripple, Gemini, and the VC firm of prominent Silicon Valley billionaire and Bitcoin advocate Tim Draper. Skyfire currently runs on Polygon, the Ethereum scaling network, but it says it plans to expand to additional blockchains soon. "We believe that without this, AI just won't work," Skyfire co-founder and CEO Amir Sarhangi told Decrypt. "Whether it's us or someone else, someone will have to do this for AI." As Sarhangi sees it, AI agents are currently nowhere close to realizing their full potential. As soon as they encounter the need to pay for anything, they're stuck in the mud, requiring a human intermediary to bail them out with a credit card. Such a system is in desperate need of streamlining, the developer says, and the traditional banking system is woefully unequipped to help. "It cannot be Visa, because those rails just do not support what AI needs, which is the ability to do microtransactions 24/7, with low fees, efficiently," he added. "That's all stuff that crypto and blockchain offer." Sarhangi and his co-founder, Craig DeWitt, are not the first people to realize the potential of fusing AI and blockchain payments. For months, crypto industry leaders like Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong have publicly insisted that AI's future depends on the adoption of on-chain payments. But they are some of the first to put that concept into action. At launch, Skyfire supports a handful of customers, ranging from a traditional auto parts manufacturer looking to streamline micropayments at auto service centers in India to AI infrastructure providers. The company also says it's currently in conversations with several major large language models (LLMs) about adopting USDC payments for AI agents that use Skyfire. Skyfire is particularly convinced that LLMs, which often refer users to third-party sites to buy premium assets or services involved in tasks, will find autonomous payments particularly attractive, given how the innovation will keep AI agents buzzing -- and spending -- in one place. "In that process, you're losing a lot of users," Sarhangi said of the current multi-site flow for AI users interacting with services created by multiple developers. Currently, these sites require subscriptions or the purchase of credits, as opposed to on-demand payments. For other companies and services that don't yet support payments in USDC, Skyfire will utilize third-party aggregators to facilitate AI payments. Such aggregators would allow an AI agent to instantly purchase a plane ticket on United, for example, even if the airline only accepts traditional payment methods. The company's founders are confident, however, that by providing the first major pathway for AI agents to transact independently, they are opening the floodgates to a new digital economy fueled by a novel, nonhuman class of clients. If they're right, most businesses might then soon be incentivized to integrate USDC as a payment method. "AI agents are going to be the next evolution of customers," Sarhangi said. Skyfire is currently free to use but says it may soon take a fee on transactions, ranging from 2 to 3%. It sees its long-term value, however, as sourcing from add-on services that increase faith in the emergent AI agent economy, like verifying businesses that accept its payments. The company is also doubling down on guardrail features for customers, like controlling how much money AI agents have access to in their wallets, creating spending limits for transactions, and instituting rules that require agents to always select lower-priced goods and services, for example. If the future indeed brings 20 robots running around and spending your money, Skyfire is betting trust may soon become one of the internet's hottest commodities.