There's a lot of hype around the promise of AI agents right now, but payment is a major limiting factor. Currently, an AI agent may be able to independently plan a vacation for you, but human intervention is required when entering credit card information. Skyfire Systems wants to change this.
Skyfire has created a payment network for AI agents to transact autonomously. Of course, AI agents are currently difficult to control, so the idea of them being tied to a bank account is scary. However, Skyfire has put in a number of safeguards to prevent AI agents from overspending, so overall it's not that scary.
Skyfire assigns each AI agent a digital wallet with a unique identifier, into which companies can deposit the amount they want their agents to spend, rather than having unlimited access to a bank account. Skyfire also allows customers to set limits on how much their AI agents can spend in a single transaction or over a period of time. If an AI agent tries to overspend, it will ask a human for review. Skyfire also provides a dashboard that shows exactly how much agents are spending and where.
Skyfire's dashboard for tracking AI agent spending.
Skyfire co-founder and CEO Amir Sarhangi sold his last startup, Jibe, to Google and helped pioneer the RCS messaging protocol that became the standard for Android's 1 billion users. Now he's working on an open protocol to power payments in the AI era.
“AI agents can't do anything unless you can pay them. They're just a cosmetic search,” Skyfire co-founder and chief product officer Craig DeWitt told TechCrunch in an interview. “Either you find a way for them to actually do something, or they don't do anything. Then they're not agents.”
On Wednesday, Skyfire officially launched its payments network, announcing it had raised $8.5 million in seed funding from Neuberger Berman, Inception Capital, Arrington Capital and other investors. (Arrington Capital is led by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, who left the publication in 2011.)
Paying agents
It's worth noting that Skyfire isn't building AI agents, but many companies are already doing so. All of these companies are trying to make sure their agents don't go berserk and send 4,000 printers into their offices when an old printer (ideally just one) runs out of ink. Skyfire has added safeguards, but the founders say it's ultimately up to the companies behind them to calibrate their AI agents to behave responsibly.
Skyfire specializes in building a payment network through which these agents can transact, and it does so using blockchain technology. Its founders were early executives at cryptocurrency startup Ripple, where they helped build an international payment network that transacted more than $50 billion during their tenure there.
Businesses can deposit and withdraw US dollars from Skyfire, but the platform internally converts those dollars into a digital stablecoin. Skyfire uses USDC, a digital stablecoin pegged to the value of the US dollar, and stores it in wallets tied to its agents.
Skyfire takes 2% to 3% of each transaction to make money, but said its verification services could become another revenue stream in the future. As AI companies struggle to make money on expensive models, more may turn to payments as a way to break even.
The founders told TechCrunch that some AI agents have already put their own money into Skyfire during beta testing over the past two months.
DENSO, a global auto parts manufacturer, created AI agents to source materials without human help. These systems could find the materials DENSO wanted to buy, but a human had to step in and wire the money at the end of the month. Now, with Skyfire, DENSO's AI agents can operate fully autonomously.
Another company already using Skyfire is Payman, which, like Fiverr, enables AI to pay humans for a variety of tasks. Skyfire's platform allows Payman's AI agents to, at least in theory, hire and pay contract workers completely autonomously.
For now, Skyfire is focused on B2B use cases for its payments network, but its CEO says that's just the beginning.
“The protocol that we've built will be an open protocol that any company can use, even our competitors,” Saruhangi said in an interview. “When it comes to payments in an AI world, we want this to be what everyone uses.”
Skyfire's founders believe that AI agents will fundamentally change how we buy things on the internet. Today, to buy something online, a human enters a lot of personal information and selects an image of a traffic cone to verify their identity. Skyfire hopes that its payments network will eliminate the need for this interface, with AI agents one day acting as secure intermediaries between merchants and your bank account.