Sapiom raises $15 million to help AI agents buy their own tech tools | TechCrunch

People with no coding knowledge are finding that they can build their own apps using Vibrant Coding—solutions like Lovable that translate plain-language descriptions into working code.

While these quick-coding tools can help create nice prototypes, getting them into full-scale production (as this reporter recently found out) can be tricky without figuring out how to connect your app to external tech services like those that can send text messages via SMS, email, and handle Stripe payments.

Ilan Zerbib, who spent five years as director of payments engineering at Shopify, is building a solution that could eliminate these back-end infrastructure issues for non-technical creators.

Last summer, Zerbib launched Sapiom, a startup developing a financial layer that allows AI agents to securely purchase and access software, APIs, data and computation — essentially creating a payment system that allows AI to automatically purchase the services it needs.

Every time an AI agent connects to an external tool like Twilio for SMS, it requires authentication and a micropayment. Sapiom’s goal is to make this whole process seamless, letting an AI agent decide what to buy and when, without human intervention.

“In the future, applications will use services that require payment. Right now there is no easy way for agents to actually access all of this,” said Amit Kumar, partner at Accel.

Kumar has met with dozens of AI payments startups, but believes Zerbib’s focus on the financial layer for businesses, rather than consumers, is what’s really needed to make AI agents work. That’s why Accel is leading Sapiom’s $15 million seed round, with participation from Okta Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Array Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic and Coinbase Ventures.

“If you really think about it, every API call is a payment. Every time you send a text message, it’s a payment. Every time you start a server for AWS, it’s a payment,” Kumar told TechCrunch.

While it’s still early days for Sapiom, the startup hopes its infrastructure solution will be adopted by vibration coding companies and other companies creating AI agents that will eventually be tasked with doing many things themselves.

For example, anyone who has a vibe-coded app with SMS functionality won’t have to manually register with Twilio, add a credit card, and copy the API key into their code. Instead, Sapiom handles everything in the background, and the person who creates the microapp, Lovable, Bolt, or another vibration coding platform, will charge Twilio’s services as a pass-through fee.

While Sapiom is currently focused on B2B solutions, its technology could eventually enable personal AI agents to process consumer transactions. Individuals are expected to one day trust agents to make independent financial decisions, such as ordering an Uber or shopping on Amazon. While that future is exciting, Zerbib believes AI won’t make people buy more things, so he’s instead focused on creating financial layers for businesses.