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

People without a coding background are discovering that they can build their own custom apps using vibe coding — solutions like Lovable that turn ordinary descriptions into working code.

While these prompt-to-code tools can help create good prototypes, launching them into full-scale production can be difficult (as this reporter recently discovered) without figuring out how to connect the application to external technical services, such as those that can send text messages via SMS, email, and process Stripe payments.

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

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

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

“In the future, apps will consume services that require payment. Right now there is no easy way for agents to access all that,” said Amit Kumar, a partner at Accel.

Kumar has met with dozens of startups in the AI ​​payments space, but he 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 an SMS, it’s a payment. Every time you create 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 vibe coding companies and other companies creating AI agents that will eventually be tasked with doing many things on their own.

For example, anyone who vibe-coded an app with SMS capabilities doesn’t need to manually sign up for Twilio, add a credit card, and copy an API key into their code. Instead, Sapiom handles all that in the background, and the person building the microapp will be charged for Twilio’s services as a pass-through fee by Lovable, Bolt, or another vibe coding platform.

While Sapiom is currently focused on B2B solutions, its technology could eventually enable personal AI agents to handle consumer transactions. The expectation is that individuals will 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 that AI won’t magically make people buy more things, so he’s instead focusing on creating economic layers for businesses.