Retailers keep being told that AI assistants are the next storefront. The hard part is wiring a catalogue, a live inventory count and a checkout into each one, then doing it again when the next agent framework arrives.
Firmly, a Seattle startup, built that wiring once and now sells it to everyone. Squarepoint Capital led its $15M Series A, J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard and Samsung Next came aboard as strategic backers, and the total raised now stands near $20M.
One connection instead of many
Firmly Connect plugs into a merchant’s existing commerce stack. Product pages, the catalogue and checkout are then presented to every destination through a single standard connection. Ownership does not move: the merchant remains merchant of record, retains its customer data and keeps its own payment provider. Destinations only integrate with Firmly once.
Chief executive Kumar Senthil puts the value plainly: merchants are not in the business of managing protocols, they are in the business of selling products. He charges between $2,000 and $15,000 a month depending on the merchandise value moving through the platform, which carries more than 11 million merchants moving over $900B in gross merchandise volume.
Mastercard is a partner as well as an investor
Catalogue and cart capabilities inside Agent Connect, the card network’s own agentic commerce offering, run on Firmly, and Mastercard is recruiting merchants into the service. Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol is chasing similar ground, so distribution through a payments incumbent is the moat being purchased here.
Onboarding has compressed fast: four to six weeks per merchant in 2024, a week in 2025, a day or less now. Alongside the round, Firmly launched Ask Agent, a conversational assistant merchants can drop onto their own sites. Early deployments reported conversion lifts of up to 18%.
