Firmly CEO Kumar Senthil says merchants shouldn’t have to build a new integration for every AI shopping channel. (Firmly Photo)
Firmly , a Seattle-area startup that helps online retailers sell through AI shopping assistants, raised a $15 million Series A round led by Squarepoint Capital, with participation from J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard, Samsung Next and others.
The company, founded in 2019, connects retailers’ existing online stores to AI assistants, marketplaces and other shopping channels, so people can buy products inside those third-party apps and services without going to retailers’ websites. Retailers keep their own payment providers and customer relationships.
“Every new AI assistant, marketplace or shopping platform is another place to sell. But connecting to each one can take serious engineering, because catalogs, inventory, payments, and checkout all have to work together,” wrote Kumar Senthil , Firmly’s co-founder and CEO, in a blog post announcing the round.
Mastercard is a commercial partner as well as an investor. Firmly handles the merchant side of Mastercard Agent Connect , a service launched in September to link merchants, AI agents and payment providers through a single integration.
Senthil told Axios Pro that Mastercard is recruiting merchants for the service, giving Firmly a route to new customers.
Firmly charges merchants $2,000 to $15,000 a month, depending on the total value of merchandise they sell, Senthil told Axios. He said connecting a merchant took four to six weeks in 2024 and now takes a day or less, including testing.
The company lists Best Buy, Furniture.com and Backcountry among its retail customers. RetailMeNot and an AI shopping app called Wizard also use its technology.
The funding comes as AI shopping agents move into the mainstream. Meta’s Muse assistant can browse retail sites and buy items with a user’s approval. Amazon has blocked Muse from its site and is suing Perplexity over a shopping agent in the startup’s Comet browser.
Firmly takes a different approach from those agents. Instead of having software click through a retailer’s web pages, it connects directly to the retailer’s systems with its permission.
The company this week also launched Ask Agent , an AI shopping assistant for retailers’ own websites. Shoppers describe what they want, get product recommendations and can check out without leaving the chat.
Other investors in the round include Alumni Ventures, ARK Invest, Benhamou Global Ventures, Granada Funds, Hike Ventures, The Mercantile Companies and Versus Ventures.
The round brings Firmly’s total funding to about $20 million. The company had raised $5.2 million when it partnered with Perplexity in March 2025 on shopping features inside the AI search app.
Senthil spent eight years at Microsoft and later led e-commerce products at Samsung. He co-founded Firmly with Damien Balsan , a co-founder of LoopPay, the mobile payments startup acquired by Samsung, and Murali Krishnamurthy, Firmly’s CTO and a former chief technical architect for Samsung’s U.S. and global e-commerce business.
