Firmly Raises $15M Series A From Squarepoint, Mastercard, and J.P. Morgan for AI Agent Commerce

Firmly, an e-commerce infrastructure startup based in the Seattle area, has raised a $15 million Series A round to expand software that connects online merchants directly to artificial intelligence shopping assistants and third-party marketplaces.

The funding round was led by Squarepoint Capital, with participation from J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard, Samsung Next, Alumni Ventures, ARK Invest, Benhamou Global Ventures, Granada Funds, Hike Ventures, The Mercantile Companies, and Versus Ventures, GeekWire reported. The financing brings Firmly's total equity raised to approximately $20 million following an earlier $5.2 million seed injection.

Founded in 2019, Firmly builds technical connections between retailers' existing web stores and external conversational platforms, allowing customers to purchase merchandise inside third-party apps without navigating directly to the seller's storefront. Unlike consumer-facing web-browsing bots that scrape product pages and simulate human checkout clicks, Firmly connects through authorized backend integrations with merchant catalogs, inventory databases, and order management systems. Participating retailers retain their existing payment processors, order fulfillment pipelines, and direct customer accounts.

The investment coincides with an expanding commercial distribution pact with Mastercard. Firmly operates the merchant-facing layer of Mastercard Agent Connect, an infrastructure service introduced in September to link AI shopping agents, payment rails, and enterprise sellers. In remarks to Axios Pro cited by GeekWire, co-founder and chief executive Kumar Senthil noted that Mastercard recruits merchants directly for the joint service, creating a structured acquisition funnel for the startup.

Firmly charges merchants a recurring software fee between $2,000 and $15,000 per month, calibrated to the gross volume of merchandise processed over the network. According to Senthil, the engineering setup time required to onboard a new merchant declined from four to six weeks in 2024 to 24 hours or less today, inclusive of verification testing.

The company lists Best Buy, Furniture.com, and Backcountry among its enterprise retail clients, alongside coupon aggregator RetailMeNot and shopping assistant app Wizard. Firmly previously collaborated with search engine Perplexity in March 2025 to enable transactional checkout features inside Perplexity's conversational interface.

The capital infusion highlights a brewing technical and legal battle over agentic e-commerce. As autonomous assistants such as Meta's Muse attempt to scour storefronts and transact on behalf of users, major platforms have pushed back: Amazon blocked Muse from crawling its website and filed suit against Perplexity over automated shopping agents deployed within its Comet web browser. Firmly is betting that enterprise merchants will favor permissioned, API-level connections that maintain visibility over inventory and preserve their payment economics over uncoordinated web scraping.

Alongside the Series A announcement, Firmly introduced Ask Agent, a conversational shopping tool that merchants can embed directly onto their own digital storefronts. The tool allows visitors to input conversational product requests and complete order checkouts without leaving the chat interface.

Senthil spent eight years at Microsoft before directing e-commerce product development at Samsung. He co-founded Firmly with Damien Balsan, a co-founder of mobile wallet developer LoopPay before its acquisition by Samsung, and chief technology officer Murali Krishnamurthy, previously chief technical architect for Samsung's global e-commerce operations.