Sapiom raises $15M to help AI agents buy their own tech tools

People without programming backgrounds are discovering that they can build their own custom applications using dynamic programming — solutions like Lovable that turn simple language descriptions into working code.

While these code tools can help create great prototypes, launching them into full-scale production (as this reporter recently discovered) can be difficult without knowing how to connect the app to external tech services, like those that can send SMS text messages, email, and process Stripe payments.

Ilan Zarbib, who spent five years as a payments engineering manager at Shopify, is building a solution that can eliminate back-end infrastructure headaches for non-technical creators.

Last summer, Zarbib launched Sapiuma San Francisco startup developing a financial layer that allows AI agents to securely purchase and access software, APIs, data, and computing — essentially creating a payment system that allows AI to automatically purchase the services it needs.

Every time an AI agent connects to an external tool like Twilio for SMS, it requires authentication and a micropayment. Sapiom’s goal is to make this entire process seamless, allowing the AI ​​agent to decide what to buy and when to buy it without human intervention.

“In the future, apps will consume services that require payment. “Right now, there’s no easy way for agents to actually access all of that,” said Amit Kumar, partner at Accel.

Kumar has met dozens of startups in the AI ​​payments space, but he believes Zarbib’s focus on the financial layer of institutions, rather than consumers, is what’s really needed to make AI agents work. That’s why Accel is leading Sapiom’s $15 million seed round, with participation from Okta Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Array Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, and Coinbase Ventures.

“If you really think about it, every API call is a batch. Every time you send a text message, that’s a batch. Every time you run a server for AWS, that’s a batch,” Kumar told TechCrunch.

Although it’s still early days for Sapiom, the startup hopes its infrastructure solutions will be adopted by biocoding companies and other companies creating AI agents that will eventually be tasked with doing many things on their own.

For example, someone who coded an app with SMS capabilities wouldn’t have to manually sign up with Twilio, add a credit card, and copy the API key into their code. Instead, Sapiom handles all of that in the background, and the person building the applet will be charged for Twilio’s services as a pass-through fee by Lovable, Bolt, or another crypto platform.

While Sapiom is currently focused on B2B solutions, its technology could eventually enable personal AI agents to handle consumer transactions. It is expected that people will one day trust agents to make independent financial decisions, such as ordering an Uber or shopping on Amazon. While this future is exciting, Zarbib believes that AI will not magically make people buy more things, which is why he is focusing on creating financial layers for businesses instead.