Sapiom has launched with a $15.75 million seed round as it builds what it describes as an access layer for AI agents to safely transact across paid APIs and real-world services. The round was led by Accel, with participation from Gradient, Array Ventures, Okta Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, Coinbase Ventures, Formus Capital, and Operator Collective.
In its launch announcement, the company argues that much of the modern internet economy was designed around the assumption that a human would be present to authenticate, manage credentials, and approve spending.
Sapiom’s thesis is that this breaks down as economic activity shifts toward machine-to-machine workflows, in which agents not only recommend actions through chat interfaces but also execute them, provision compute, purchase data, call paid APIs, and orchestrate end-to-end processes.
Sapiom’s product centers on the idea that programmable, policy-controlled spending can unlock access to the long tail of services agents need to operate autonomously. The company says it turns spend into a developer primitive, abstracting identity, wallets, policy enforcement, risk controls, metering, billing, and settlement behind a single integration, so software can pay for services under defined constraints rather than relying on one-off integrations and manual onboarding.
The launch post is written by founder and CEO Ilan Zerbib, who points to prior experience as founder of Earny, acquired in 2021, and nearly five years at Shopify working in payments, including scaling Shop Pay to over $100 billion in GMV and building Shop Cash from the ground up. Zerbib positions Sapiom as infrastructure for machine commerce, arguing that as agents become economic actors, they will need rails designed for software-driven procurement and settlement rather than systems built for people clicking through consumer checkout flows.
