Imagine this: you’re scrolling through a chat conversation, an AI search result, or a shopping-focused app, and instead of being redirected to yet another website with a slow-loading product page, you just finish the purchase right there. The order goes through, the retailer gets paid, and you never had to leave the moment of intent. That’s the future Firmly is betting on, and it just got a serious infusion of cash to make it happen. The Seattle-area startup, founded in 2019, recently announced a $15 million Series A funding round led by Squarepoint Capital, with participation from some heavy hitters in the financial and tech worlds, including J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard, Samsung Next, and a broader group of investors like Alumni Ventures, ARK Invest, Benhamou Global Ventures, Granada Funds, Hike Ventures, The Mercantile Companies, and Versus Ventures. For a company that most shoppers have probably never heard of, this is a major vote of confidence. It’s also a sign that the way we buy things online is changing faster than many of us realize, and that retailers are scrambling to figure out how to sell through AI-powered assistants without losing their shirts—or their customers.
To understand why Firmly exists, you have to understand the problem it’s trying to solve. AI shopping assistants are popping up everywhere these days. There’s a chatbot that can recommend a birthday gift, an agent that can order groceries, a search engine that can find and buy a jacket for you. But for retailers, every one of these platforms is a new storefront that needs to be built, connected, and maintained. And as Kumar Senthil, Firmly’s co-founder and CEO, put it, that’s not easy. “Every new AI assistant, marketplace or shopping platform is another place to sell. But connecting to each one can take serious engineering, because catalogs, inventory, payments, and checkout all have to work together.” In other words, a retailer can’t just say, “Sure, sell my products on that new AI thing.” They need a technical bridge that lets the AI system look up products in real time, check stock, process payments, and complete a checkout—all while making sure the retailer’s own systems stay in sync. Without that bridge, the whole experience falls apart. Firmly’s pitch is simple: don’t build a custom integration for every new channel. Build once, and then let Firmly handle the rest. Retailers get to keep their own payment providers, their own customer data, and their own relationship with the buyer, even if the purchase happens inside some third-party app. That’s a big deal, because in a world where data is power, no retailer wants to hand over all of its customer insights to an AI platform just to make a sale.
The company’s business model reflects just how valuable that convenience is. Firmly charges merchants anywhere from $2,000 to $15,000 a month, depending on the total value of the merchandise they sell. That might sound like a lot, but consider what it replaces. In 2024, getting a merchant connected to a single AI shopping channel took four to six weeks, according to Senthil. Now, thanks to more mature tools and standardized processes, it takes a day or less, including testing. For a mid-sized retailer, that’s the difference between missing an entire sales season and being ready for it. The list of companies already using Firmly includes some familiar names: Best Buy, Furniture.com, and Backcountry, along with RetailMeNot and an AI shopping app called Wizard. These are not tiny mom-and-pop shops. They’re established players that could potentially hire their own engineering teams to build integrations, but they’ve chosen to let Firmly do the heavy lifting instead. That’s a strong signal that the startup is solving a real, painful problem. And the partnership with Mastercard adds even more credibility. Mastercard isn’t just writing a check; it’s also a commercial partner. Firmly handles the merchant side of Mastercard Agent Connect, a service launched in September to link merchants, AI agents, and payment providers through a single integration. Senthil told Axios Pro that Mastercard is actively recruiting merchants for that service, which gives Firmly a direct pipeline to new customers that it wouldn’t have on its own. When a payments giant like Mastercard decides to use your technology to connect its own network of merchants to AI agents, that’s a pretty good endorsement.
All of this comes at a moment when AI shopping agents are finally moving into the mainstream, but not without friction. Meta has its own assistant, called Muse, which can browse retail sites and buy items with a user’s approval. Amazon, however, has blocked Muse from its site, and the tech giant is also suing Perplexity over a shopping agent in the startup’s Comet browser. The legal and technical battles show how messy this emerging ecosystem really is. There are two very different philosophies at play. On one side, you have agents that try to act like a human shopper, clicking through web pages, filling out forms, and checking out as if they were a person with a browser. That approach can be clever, but it’s also fragile. Websites change, scripts break, and many retailers don’t want automated bots crawling through their checkout flows. It can also create tension with retailers and platforms that would prefer to keep control over the shopping experience. Firmly takes a completely different approach. Instead of having software work its way through a retailer’s public-facing website, Firmly connects directly to the retailer’s systems with explicit permission. It’s the difference between trying to get into a concert by sneaking past security and walking in through the VIP entrance with a badge. The direct integration is faster, more reliable, and far less likely to cause conflicts. It also means that when an AI agent buys something through Firmly, every step—from product discovery to inventory checks to payment—happens through official channels. That matters for trust. Retailers know exactly what’s happening. Customers get a smoother experience. And AI platforms don’t have to worry about their agents being blocked or sued for bypassing a company’s terms of service.
Firmly isn’t just trying to make other people’s AI shopping assistants work better. This week, the company also launched Ask Agent, an AI shopping assistant that retailers can put on their own websites. Instead of relying on a third-party chatbot to guide customers, retailers can now offer a built-in conversational experience where shoppers describe what they want, get product recommendations, and check out without ever leaving the chat window. For retailers, this is a way to compete in a world where more and more shopping is starting in an AI interface rather than on a website. If someone is going to use AI to shop, wouldn’t you rather they do it on your own site? Ask Agent is a smart move because it lets Firmly serve both sides of the market. On one hand, the startup is a back-end provider that connects retailers to external AI platforms. On the other hand, it’s enabling retailers to become AI platforms themselves. It’s a balanced strategy, and it helps explain why investors are getting excited. The new funding round brings Firmly’s total raised to about $20 million, which is a relatively modest amount for a company that’s been around since 2019. But it’s worth noting that Firmly had already raised $5.2 million back in March 2025, when it partnered with Perplexity on shopping features inside the AI search app. That partnership appears to have opened doors, and now the company is in a position to scale. The fact that J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard, and Samsung Next all participated in this round suggests that both the financial industry and the broader tech ecosystem see Firmly as a neutral, reliable layer in a very chaotic market.
Behind the company is a team with deep roots in both big tech and mobile payments. Kumar Senthil spent eight years at Microsoft and later led e-commerce products at Samsung, so he’s seen firsthand how difficult it is to build commerce systems that work across different devices, platforms, and markets. He co-founded Firmly with Damien Balsan, who co-founded LoopPay, the mobile payments startup that was acquired by Samsung, and Murali Krishnamurthy, Firmly’s CTO and a former chief technical architect for Samsung’s U.S. and global e-commerce business. In other words, these are people who have been in the trenches of payments and digital commerce for a long time. They know that the hardest part of commerce is not the front-end experience; it’s all the plumbing underneath. And they’ve built Firmly to be exactly that—the plumbing that lets AI shopping agents and retailers talk to each other without a million custom integrations. The company’s name is a good hint at its philosophy. It wants to be the thing that holds everything together, firmly and reliably, so that retailers can adapt to whatever comes next. We’re probably going to see more AI assistants, more legal disputes, more startups trying to claim a piece of the shopping experience. But through all of that, retailers will need a way to be present wherever shoppers are, without sacrificing their own control or their own data. Firmly is betting that the future of shopping is not about one dominant AI platform, but about a network of them, and that someone has to make that network workable. For shoppers, that could mean more choices and fewer dead ends. For retailers, it means not being left behind as the web evolves from websites to conversations. The future of shopping may not happen on a retailer’s website at all. But thanks to Firmly, that might not matter.
