Skyfire recently announced significant growth for the world’s only payment network built for the AI Agent economy, enabling fully autonomous transactions across AI Agents, LLMs, data platforms, online retail, service providers, etc. And the company announced new funding from Coinbase Ventures and a16z CSX.
Over the last few weeks since the company went live, it has started processing payments between AI Agents and businesses ranging from LLM aggregators to large-scale financial services.
This growth comes just over one month after the launch of Skyfire. And this essential operating layer for Agent-to-Agent and Agent-to-Business payments had previously been missing from the AI economy. Skyfire provides secure wallet access, verifiable Agent identity, and an open payment protocol for service requests, purchasing decisions, and instant transactions without human intervention – while including easy guardrails for agent spending. The result is a payment network allows businesses to monetize their products and services to Agents,.
Businesses that recently joined the Skyfire payment network include:
1.) Emergence AI – An agentic AI company pioneering the development of autonomous AI agents and orchestration systems that transform enterprise workflows. Its technology helps enterprises boost productivity, reduce costs, and unlock new opportunities in human-computer interactions.
2.) Pricing Culture—Processed data and content feeds for human and machine audiences. Specialized data products, including Historical Price Indicators and Daily Price Comps, provide comprehensive contextual information on the prices of cultural assets such as Art, Collectibles, Real Estate, and more.
3.) Venice AI – Access to private, censorship-free, and open-source LLMs founded by Erik Vorhees. Search the world’s information, have rich conversations, analyze documents, and create exciting images and art of any style at the push of a button.
4.) Micro1 – Agentic Al recruitment engine to source, vet, and hire your entire global team.
5.) Vetric – Scalable and real-time data enrichment. Best-in-class public data solutions let data-centric product teams forget about data sourcing and focus on their product.
6.) OpenRouter – An LLM aggregation company that provides access to 160+ LLMs. Find the best models and prices for your prompts.
7.) Net Nut (a Subsidiary of Alarum Technologies) – Net Nut’s offerings include Rotating Residential Proxies, static Residential Proxies, Mobile IPs, and Datacenter Proxies.
Skyfire is now integrated with Base – The Ethereum layer 2 blockchain incubating at Coinbase – to enable low-cost payment rails for all Agent payments. Typical transactions on Base cost less than $0.01 each, making onchain transactions driven by AI more accessible to enterprise customers. Skyfire allows any AI Agent to use the Coinbase wallet to store value and process transactions with other Agents, companies, or even people.
This integration coincides with Coinbase Ventures’ new investment in Skyfire, which joins the company’s recently announced seed round. Skyfire also received funding from the a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator as a participant in the CSX Fall 2024 cohort in New York, bringing its total funding to $9.5 million.
KEY QUOTES:
“When we launched Skyfire, we knew we were addressing a critical gap in AI, but the speed and scale of adoption across industries have significantly exceeded our expectations. Every day, we’re onboarding new partners into our payment network, empowering them to build thousands of AI agents that are now not only capable but also ready to transact seamlessly using Skyfire.”
“Many AI experts said that the growth of Agents would outpace human consumers in the next five years; based on the conversations we’re having, that’s a dramatic understatement. If you’re operating in any part of the AI economy and not integrating payments, you’re getting left behind.”
- Amir Sarhangi, co-founder and CEO of Skyfire
“At Emergence AI, our mission is to push the boundaries of autonomous agent technology to drive transformative solutions across industries. Our partnership with Skyfire allows us to seamlessly integrate their advanced payment network into our Orchestrator platform and agents, enabling us to adopt and test autonomous payment transactions. This collaboration aligns perfectly with our vision to streamline operations and simplify intricate workflows, delivering real value for enterprises worldwide,” said Satya Nitta, Co-Founder and CEO of Emergence AI.
“Skyfire is essentially Visa for the AI economy – that is an incredibly powerful piece of infrastructure that will be critical to the success of AI Agents. Without it, Agents are just window shopping,” said Craig DeWitt, Skyfire co-founder. “Traditional payment rails were never built to transact at AI scale, globally, instantly, and at fractions of a penny, which is what makes our approach to verifiable agent identities and USDC transactions so transformative.”
