Financial Stack for the AI economy: AI agents will make and receive global, autonomous payments, built by former execs from Google, Ripple, and more
Skyfire Systems, Incorporated announced the launch of the world’s first payment network built to enable fully autonomous transactions across AI Agents, LLM’s, data platforms, service providers, and other goods and services. Skyfire creates an essential operating layer, delivering 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. The result is the foundation of a new global economy where businesses can monetize their products and services to Agents, the world’s fastest-growing market of consumers. The company also announced $8.5 million 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.
“Today, AI Agents can’t be served, unable to make or receive payments without human help. 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.”
“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. Our research indicates the market size of Agent to Agent commerce alone can reach $46 billion over the next three years,” said Amir Sarhangi, CEO and co-founder of Skyfire. “Today, AI Agents can’t be served, unable to make or receive payments without human help. 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.”
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To deliver on this promise, the Skyfire network features:
- Open, Global Payments Protocol: Open and global interoperability for AI, providing access to LLM’s, datasets, and API services without the need for subscriptions, credit cards, or onboarding.
- Automated Budgets and Control: User-controlled spending logic lets developers and their customers set specific budgets for single transactions, discrete tasks, or ongoing campaigns, ensuring Agents stay within business parameters.
- AgentID & History: Skyfire provides open identifiers for authentication and authorization and verifies Agents to ensure transactions are trustworthy. The history of transactions for Agents and providers provides an additional verification of good actors.
- Verification Service: Verification of Agent developers and service providing businesses to allow participants complete visibility and control over allowable network connections.
- Funding on Ramps: Agents can be funded through traditional, banked rails or with stablecoins. All AI transactions are completed instantly.
“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,” said Craig DeWitt, co-founder and Head of Product at Skyfire. “Today, they’re restricted by an inability to make or receive payments without human oversight. Skyfire breaks these barriers. We’ve created a platform that equips AI agents with identity, budgets, and a universal payment system—all in just a 10-minute SDK integration. This isn’t merely about payments; it’s about unlocking the full potential of AI to make the world a better place.”
Skyfire’s payment protocol enables LLMs to tap APIs and premium content, within a workflow, expanding the reach and versatility of what’s possible in workflows today.
Prior to founding Skyfire, both Sarhangi and DeWitt served as early executives at Ripple and developed the fundamental payments tech that enabled instant, universally accepted payments for transactions that previously took weeks. They assembled a team of professionals including AI, payments, and blockchain experts and senior engineering leads from Google and Ripple.
“The infrastructure opportunity for AI Agents is massive and new developments will drive advancement in Web3 across applications,” said Michael Arrington of Arrington Capital. “Skyfire has identified a very critical need at this point in time, assembled a team that has revolutionized payments before, understands the needs of this market deeply, and is moving fast enough to become the industry standard before the traditional payments players have a chance to catch up. We’ve seen this story play out with the likes of PayPal and Stripe, and are excited to see what Skyfire is going to accomplish next.”
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