Even people with no coding experience are discovering that they can use Vibe Coding to build their own custom apps. This is a Lovable-like solution that turns plain language descriptions into actionable code.
These prompt code tools can help you create great prototypes, but (as this reporter recently discovered) putting them into production can be difficult unless you find a way to connect your application to external technical services, such as services that can send text messages via SMS or email or process Stripe payments.
Ilan Zerbib, who served as Director of Payments Engineering at Shopify for five years, builds solutions that eliminate backend infrastructure headaches for non-technical creators.
Last summer, Zerbib launched Sapiom, a startup that develops a financial layer that allows AI agents to securely purchase and access software, APIs, data, and compute. This essentially creates a payment system where AI can automatically purchase the services you need.
Every time your AI agent connects to an external tool like Twilio for SMS, it requires authentication and micropayments. Sapiom's goal is to make this entire process seamless, letting AI agents decide what to buy and when without human intervention.
“In the future, apps will use 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 with dozens of startups in the AI payments space and believes that Zerbib's focus on the corporate financial layer rather than consumers is what is really needed to make AI agents work. To that end, Accel is leading Sapiom's $15 million seed round with participation from Okta Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Array Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, and Coinbase Ventures.
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“If you think about it, every API call is a payment. Every time you send a text message, it's a payment. Every time you start a server on AWS, it's a payment,” Kumar told TechCrunch.
Although Sapiom is still in its early stages, the startup hopes its infrastructure solution will be adopted by vibe coding companies and other companies that create AI agents that will eventually do many things on their own.
For example, someone who has vibecoded an app with SMS functionality doesn't have to manually sign up for Twilio, add a credit card, or copy an API key into their code. Instead, Sapiom handles all of this in the background, and the person building the microapp is billed for Twilio's services as a pass-through fee by Lovable, Bolt, or another vibe coding platform.
Sapiom is currently focused on B2B solutions, but its technology could eventually enable personal AI agents to handle consumer transactions. The expectation is that individuals will one day rely on agents to make independent financial decisions, such as ordering an Uber or shopping on Amazon. While the future is interesting, Zerbib doesn't think AI will magically make people buy more things. That's why we're focusing on creating a financial layer for businesses instead.