Nekuda, a company building infrastructure for agentic payments, announced a $5 million funding round led by Madrona Ventures with participation from global financial leaders including Amex Ventures and Visa Ventures.
What the funding will be used for: The funding will accelerate Nekuda’s mission to enable AI agents to make secure, autonomous online payments by managing payment credentials and authorizations and setting up security guardrails. Additional investors include Paul Klein, CEO of Browserbase, Shyamal Hitesh Anadkat, Applied AI at OpenAI and Sahar Mor.
Value proposition: AI agents are starting to drive a new wave of commerce as seen in recent announcements such as OpenAI’s shopping features, Perplexity Shop, and Amazon’s “Buy for Me” feature. These new experiences are expected to span everything from routine consumer purchases to complex, high-value decisions. But technical hurdles remain in adopting agentic payments: today’s agents are still constrained by their inability to complete transactions without human intervention.
This is since the current system assumes a human is always present to press “Buy” — which breaks down when software takes the wheel. While authentication is well-established, authorization (what an agent is allowed to do) is a new challenge. Users still click external links and complete the checkout process manually on retailer websites, highlighting a key gap between intelligent shopping assistance and true agentic commerce, where AI would execute transactions independently. Without a clear, verifiable mandate from the user, agentic payments may face challenges like false declines, friction requiring human intervention and new security risks.
With the launch of Visa Intelligent Commerce late last month, Visa is providing the underlying payments infrastructure to allow for broader AI agent integration across verticals and industries. And as part of the partnership, Nekuda expects to integrate its AI payment stack to Visa Intelligent Commerce infrastructure designed to enable fast, authenticated agent payments with high authorization rates, to help ensure every transaction is secure and user-intended.
Agentic Mandates and Secure Credentialing: Nekuda’s SDK brings agent-driven transactions into the existing payment ecosystem without requiring a full overhaul. It’s built around two core pillars:
1.) Secure Agent Wallet – Users can delegate payment credentials to an AI agent in a safe, compliant way. The agent can store and inject payment details securely at checkout, ensuring it can complete transactions autonomously without constantly asking for a human’s input.
2.) Agentic Mandates – Nekuda’s authorization layer captures rich, contextual signals about user purchasing intent—what the agent is allowed to buy, under which conditions, with spending limits or required approvals. And this mandate becomes a transparent, verifiable message that can be passed which the rest of the payment stack can trust.
KEY QUOTES:
“Every major tech shift—from web to social to mobile—has changed the way we transact. AI agents are next, and adoption is accelerating. But to unlock their potential in commerce, we need infrastructure that supports the new requirements that agentic commerce introduces. Nekuda solves the two biggest blockers to agent adoption in payments: usability and trust. Their platform makes it easy for developers to build secure, user-approved transactions—enabling agents to securely act on end-users’ behalf. With Visa Ventures and Amex Ventures already at the table, Nekuda is well-positioned to lead this shift.”
Jon Turow, Partner at Madrona
“The future of commerce will rely on delegating smart decisions to software, with AI agents acting on our behalf. But to make that future viable, we need a payment infrastructure that allows users to authorize agents with confidence—and gives payment networks the transparency they need to trust those transactions.”
Ayal Karmi, co-founder and CEO at Nekuda
“AI agents have the potential to transform commerce and change how we shop and pay. We need to collaborate as an ecosystem to enable the future of AI commerce – and we’re proud to support Nekuda to help power AI payments.”
Rubail Birwadker, Head of Growth Products and Partnerships at Visa
“We’re excited to support Nekuda in their mission to address the critical last mile of checkout and payment with trust and efficiency in this new era of agentic payments. Nekuda’s innovative solutions will be designed to allow AI agents to enable commerce by integrating with existing payment systems. This approach will help enable more seamless and secure payments, utilizing the networks that merchants and consumers already use and trust.”
Matt Sueoka, SVP and Global Head of Amex Ventures
