Artificial intelligence agents are becoming a new place to shop faster than merchants can plug into them.
Analysts expect AI-driven traffic to retail sites in the United States to grow 130% year over year this holiday season, according to a Thursday (Nov. 5) press release provided to PYMNTS from firmly, a Seattle startup. But every AI assistant, marketplace, social platform and agent framework has its own way of asking a store what it sells and how to buy it. Selling through any one of them means connecting the product catalog, inventory, pricing, payments and checkout. Selling through all of them means doing that work over and over, and most merchants don’t have the engineering resources to do it even once.
That gap is what firmly, which connects merchants to AI shopping channels without requiring them to write code, has raised $15 million to close. The company’s Series A was led by Squarepoint Capital, the release said. J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard and Samsung Next joined as strategic investors, along with Alumni Ventures, ARK Invest, Benhamou Global Ventures, Granada Funds, Hike Ventures, The Mercantile Companies and Versus Ventures. The company has now raised about $20 million.
The startup will use the capital to expand its firmly Connect platform with more merchants and more destinations, including AI agents, marketplaces, social networks and shoppable advertising platforms, according to the release. The platform can already reach more than 11 million merchants representing more than $900 billion in gross merchandise volume.
The platform is built to do that work once. Instead of asking the merchant to integrate with each new channel, firmly Connect integrates with the merchant’s existing commerce infrastructure and presents the catalog, product pages and checkout to every destination through one standardized connection, the release said. The merchant remains merchant of record on every order and keeps its payment provider, customer relationships and transaction data. Destinations, in turn, integrate with firmly once to reach every merchant on the platform.
“AI is quickly creating new storefronts for commerce, but merchants cannot build a new integration every time one emerges,” firmly Co-Found and CEO Kumar Senthil said in the release. “Our North Star has always been to enable the merchants to sell in any channel with zero engineering effort.”
The company is positioning itself between the two ways agents buy from merchants today. Some agents drive a web browser, reading the merchant’s page and clicking through checkout the way a person would. Others connect through an agreed set of rules. The agent asks what’s available and at what price, gets the real item, the real price and live inventory back, and receives a confirmed order when it buys. Standards for that second approach, including Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol and Mastercard’s Agent Connect, are still being adopted, and there are several of them.
“Today’s protocol standards are fragmented and can be slow to implement for merchants,” firmly Co-Founder and President Damien Balsan said in the release. The company bridges the flexibility of browser-based agents with the security and efficiency of those structured standards “without a single line of merchant code.”
Mastercard named firmly a partner in September when it launched Agent Connect, a single integration linking merchants, AI agents, digital platforms and payment providers. The startup’s role is to help businesses using Agent Connect extend their catalogs, inventory and shopping experiences into AI channels.
Alongside the funding, firmly launched Ask Agent, a conversational shopping experience merchants can add to their own websites with a single line of JavaScript, according to the release. Shoppers describe what they’re looking for in plain language and get recommendations drawn from the merchant’s real-time catalog, pricing and inventory. They can move from discovery through checkout within the conversation, with support for loyalty programs, cross-sell and post-purchase customer service. The product works with the merchant’s existing commerce systems.
Early merchant deployments of Ask Agent showed conversion rate improvements of up to 18% and increases in average order value of up to 23%, the release said.
For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI newsletter.
