Skyfire Systems Inc., a startup with software that enables artificial intelligence models to make purchases, launched today with $8.5 million in initial funding.

The investment included the participation of more than a dozen institutional backers. Among them was Ripple Labs Inc., a provider of payment processing software backed by more than $200 million in venture capital. Skyfire co-founders Amir Sarhangi and Craig DeWitt both held executive roles at Ripple before launching the startup.

Advanced AI models such as GPT-4o can perform a range of tasks in third-party services, but only if those tasks don’t involve making a payment. Neural networks currently lack the ability to complete purchases on users’ behalf. Skyfire’s namesake cloud platform is designed to address that feature gap. 

The platform allows AI developers to create a digital wallet for a large language model. They can then deposit funds into that wallet from a bank account or with USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar. Circle Internet Financial LLC, the developer of USDC, was among the participants in Skyfire’s newly disclosed funding round.

The company’s AI payments platform creates an account for every neural network that developers sign up. That account allows the model to log into the third-party services in which it will make purchases. According to Skyfire, its platform stores transactions made by an AI model in an activity log that can be used to “demonstrate your agent is a good actor” to sellers.

An LLM’s users, in turn, can create budget limits to avoid overspending. If the model attempts to make a transaction that exceeds the sum at its disposal, Skyfire notifies the affected customers.

“Our research indicates the market size of agent to agent commerce alone can reach $46 billion over the next three years,” said Sarhangi, Skyfire’s chief executive. “We see a future where millions of AI agents transact globally and autonomously through Skyfire.”

One use case that the company envisions for its platform is allowing AI models to make purchases on consumers’ behalf. Chatbots such ChatGPT can perform shopping-related tasks such as helping the user find an online store that carries a particular product, but they can’t order the product. Skyfire allows developers to add that capability to their AI services without building a custom payment system.

There are situations where an AI can only answer user questions by drawing on information from a paid data source. A financial analyst, for example, might ask a chatbot to retrieve details about a stock from a commercial market intelligence feed. Skyfire says that its platform allows enterprise AI models to automatically purchase access to paywalled data. 

Skyfire-powered neural networks can likewise purchase infrastructure. If a developer asks a coding assistant to launch a program that is too complex to run locally, the neural network could rent a cloud instance and deploy the program on that machine.

The company says that its platform can be connected to AI models and the paid services they use in a few minutes. It provides a software development kit to ease the integration process.

Ahead of its launch today, Skyfire reportedly assembled an early customer base that includes car part supplier Denso Corp. and several other companies. Going forward, the software maker plans to extend its platform by adding support for more types of transactions.

Image: Skyfire