Two startups building payments and checkout for AI shopping agents each raised $15 million, Axios Pro reported on 5 November: Firmly, in a Series A backed by J.P. Morgan Payments and Mastercard, and Snaplii, from investors including Hat-Trick Capital. That is $30 million for agent commerce in one morning, by our arithmetic.
The day before, Uber’s chief financial officer Balaji Krishnamurthy put the demand side on the record: around 500 Uber Eats orders and four rides came from AI agents in a Halloween week of about 320 million trips.
Business Pill · Agentic Commerce
An evergreen Business Engineer explainer on agentic commerce. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss Firmly, Snaplii or Uber.
The key insight: Firmly and Snaplii each raised $15 million, Axios Pro reported, $30 million in all by our arithmetic, while Uber’s chief financial officer said about 500 Uber Eats orders and four trips came from AI agents in a Halloween week of about 320 million trips.
Axios Pro describes Firmly as a company that “helps retailers sell through AI shopping assistants”. Chief executive Kumar Senthil told Axios Pro about the $15 million Series A, backed by J.P. Morgan Payments and Mastercard.
Firmly’s own website calls it “The agentic commerce platform”. It says Firmly “seamlessly extends any merchant’s real-time catalog, product pages and checkout into any channel”, and that it connects to commerce platforms including Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, WooCommerce and Shopify.
The site frames the choice for merchants as three routes: “There are three ways an agent can buy from a merchant.” It labels browser automation “Fails at scale” and merchant-built protocols “Years away”, and lists the agent protocols UCP, ACP, AP2 and MCP for its own bridge.
Axios Pro describes Snaplii as a company that “offers a prepaid wallet for AI agents”; chief executive Spencer Xu told it about the $15 million raise. Snaplii’s website calls the product “the missing payment layer for Agentic Commerce”.
Its agent page says the layer is “built on gift cards and the Prepaid Payment Network” and is “live across 500K+ locations today”. In the flow it describes, the user funds Snaplii and sets the agent’s limits, and Snaplii “Issues a one-time, transaction-scoped instrument. Real cards never exposed.”
The consumer side of the business is a gift-card cashback app. Its homepage shows “350K+” happy shoppers and “$3M+” saved by members.
The Demand Side, on the Record
Uber gave a count of agent purchases on its third-quarter call on 4 November. After J.P. Morgan’s Doug Anmuth asked about AI agents, Krishnamurthy said that for rides “it was a grand total of four trips that we fulfilled from the agents”, according to a published machine transcript.
He put Uber Eats orders from agents at around 500, and added: “So it’s very, very early and very limited traction that we’re seeing so far”. By our arithmetic, about 504 agent transactions is roughly one in 635,000 of the week’s trips.
As we read the two companies’ websites, they sell different layers: Firmly connects agents to merchants’ catalogs and checkout, and Snaplii supplies a prepaid, pre-funded payment instrument for the agent.
As we read the Axios Pro openings, the Firmly round brings in two payments incumbents, J.P. Morgan Payments and Mastercard, as backers.
As we read Uber’s figures, the measured volume of agent purchases at one large marketplace was about one in 635,000 trips in that week, by our arithmetic.
Balaji Krishnamurthy, Uber chief financial officer, on the 4 November call
“So it’s very, very early and very limited traction that we’re seeing so far”
Three Implications
FOR MERCHANTS Firmly’s site says it connects to Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, WooCommerce and Shopify, and lists the agent protocols UCP, ACP, AP2 and MCP.
FOR PAYMENTS COMPANIES Axios Pro reported that J.P. Morgan Payments and Mastercard backed Firmly’s $15 million Series A.
FOR MARKETPLACESUber’s chief financial officer described the traction so far as very limited, with four agent-booked trips in the week he described.
The framework says: “Your product stops being the thing companies buy and becomes the thing other systems assume exists.”
As we read it, Firmly and Snaplii both sell a layer that AI agents call, not a destination shoppers visit. The framework does not discuss Firmly, Snaplii, Uber or agent payments.
What Is Not Established
We read only the opening paragraphs of the two Axios Pro articles; the rest is behind its paywall. In what we read there are no valuations, no full investor lists for Firmly, and no transaction volumes for either company. Neither company’s website, as we read it, gives the size of the new rounds. Uber did not name the agents in its answer, and its figures cover one week.
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On the record this week, Mastercard and J.P. Morgan Payments backed Firmly’s checkout layer and Snaplii raised for a prepaid agent wallet, while on Uber’s call its CFO counted four agent-booked trips in a week of about 320 million and described the traction as “very, very early and very limited”.
A note on sourcing. The funding details are from the opening paragraphs of two Axios Pro articles of 5 November 2026; the product descriptions are from Firmly’s and Snaplii’s websites; the Uber figures are from our 4 November report of Uber’s third-quarter call, based on a published machine transcript. Sums and ratios are our arithmetic.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
