Firmly Raises $15M to Connect Merchants With AI Agents

By Tom Whitfield

Firmly raised a $15 million Series A led by Squarepoint Capital, bringing its total funding to about $20 million. The Seattle startup announced the financing on Nov. 5.

J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard and Samsung Next joined as strategic investors. Alumni Ventures, ARK Invest, Benhamou Global Ventures, Granada Funds, Hike Ventures, The Mercantile Companies and Versus Ventures also participated.

How does one connection reach many AI storefronts?

Firmly lets online retailers sell through AI shopping assistants without building a separate integration for each assistant. Firmly Connect plugs into an existing commerce stack and exposes a merchant’s catalog, product pages and checkout to AI agents, marketplaces, social networks and shoppable ads through one standardized connection.

Merchants remain the merchant of record, meaning they remain the seller to the customer. They keep their payment provider, customer relationships and transaction data. Each destination integrates with Firmly once to reach every merchant on the network.

This arrangement separates access to product information from control of the customer transaction, while allowing a destination to add many merchants through one technical link. Network scale changes the integration economics because Firmly concentrates connection work that would otherwise require separate links for each merchant-destination pairing.

Firmly says the network covers more than 11 million merchants representing over $900 billion in gross merchandise value. Those figures describe the company’s claimed network reach and GMV, not disclosed Firmly revenue or reported sales completed through AI agents.

“AI is quickly creating new storefronts for commerce, but merchants cannot build a new integration every time one emerges,” said co-founder and CEO Kumar Senthil. The practical result is one merchant connection feeding many destinations.

What does Ask Agent change for merchants?

Firmly also launched Ask Agent, a conversational shopping assistant that merchants add to their own sites with one line of JavaScript. It uses the merchant’s live catalog, pricing and inventory to manage product discovery and checkout, along with loyalty, cross-selling and post-purchase service.

Firmly reports that early deployments raised conversion rates by up to 18% and average order value by up to 23%. The company supplied those figures, and they have not been independently verified.

Connect leaves the merchant of record and payment data in place, while Ask Agent works with the merchant’s live catalog, pricing and inventory. The two products sit at different points in the purchase path. Connect widens distribution to outside agents and destinations, while Ask Agent guides shoppers within a merchant-controlled site.

In practical terms, Connect widens distribution, while Ask Agent seeks to raise conversion inside the merchant’s existing site.

Why do protocol standards matter?

Agent shopping follows two broad approaches. The distinction matters because each route creates different integration work for merchants.

• Browser-driving agents navigate a website and complete checkout through its user interface.
• Structured connections use standards such as Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol and Mastercard’s Agent Connect; merchants are still adopting them.

Firmly positions itself between these approaches, with Connect providing a common interface for agent destinations. Mastercard named Firmly a partner when it launched Agent Connect in September. The partnership gives Firmly a route into a standard intended for agent connections, but its value depends on merchant adoption and on how well that standard works with others.

“Today’s protocol standards are fragmented and can be slow to implement for merchants,” said co-founder and president Damien Balsan. Firmly presents its unified connection as a response to that implementation problem.

Firmly cites an Adobe forecast that AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites will grow about 130% from a year earlier this holiday season. The figure is a cited forecast, not measured traffic from Firmly’s network, but it indicates why the company is positioning its integration layer for more agent destinations.

Firmly will use the Series A proceeds to add merchants and destinations, expanding both sides of its network. Its next commercial test is whether that added capacity can turn projected AI traffic into completed transactions without requiring merchants to build separate integrations for every destination.