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San Francisco based startup Sapiom has raised $15 million in seed funding to build a financial infrastructure layer that allows artificial intelligence agents to independently purchase the software tools services and computing resources they need to operate. The round was led by Accel with participation from Okta Ventures Gradient Ventures Array Ventures Menlo Ventures Anthropic and Coinbase Ventures.
The company is targeting a growing problem created by the rise of vibe coding platforms where people with little or no technical background can build applications using plain language prompts. Tools such as Lovable and similar prompt to code systems can quickly generate working prototypes but turning those projects into production ready apps often stalls when developers must manually connect third party services like SMS email cloud hosting or Stripe payments.
Sapiom founder Ilan Zerbib spent five years as Shopify’s director of engineering for payments and says this backend complexity is the biggest obstacle preventing nontechnical creators and AI agents from scaling real products. He launched Sapiom last summer to solve that gap by creating what he describes as a financial layer for AI that handles authentication billing and payments automatically.
Every time an AI agent connects to an external service such as Twilio for SMS or AWS for compute it requires credentials authorization and a payment. Sapiom’s system is designed to manage those interactions in the background allowing an AI agent to decide what service to use and when without human intervention. For the end user this removes the need to sign up for multiple services enter credit card details or manage API keys.
“In the future apps are going to consume services which require payments. Right now there’s no easy way for agents to actually access all of that,” said Amit Kumar, a partner at Accel.
Kumar added that while he has met dozens of startups exploring AI payments Zerbib’s focus on enterprise infrastructure rather than consumer spending was key to Accel’s decision to lead the round.
Sapiom expects its platform to be adopted by vibe coding companies and AI agent builders. For example someone creating a micro app with SMS features would no longer need to manually register with Twilio. Instead Sapiom would handle service access behind the scenes and the cost of those messages would be passed through to the user by platforms like Lovable or Bolt.
While Sapiom is currently focused on B2B use cases the technology could eventually support personal AI agents that handle consumer transactions such as ordering rides or shopping online. Zerbib says that future depends on trust and reliability and is why the company is first concentrating on building robust financial rails for businesses deploying autonomous AI systems.
