Nekuda, a startup building infrastructure for agentic payments, announced a $5M funding round led by Madrona Ventures with participation from global financial services providers including Amex Ventures and Visa Ventures.
The funding will accelerate Nekuda’s mission to “enable AI agents to make secure, autonomous online payments by managing payment credentials and authorizations and setting up security guardrails.”
Additional investors include Paul Klein, CEO of Browserbase, Shyamal Hitesh Anadkat, Applied AI at OpenAI and Sahar Mor.
AI agents are driving a wave of commerce — as seen in announcements such as OpenAI’s shopping features, Perplexity Shop, and Amazon’s “Buy for Me” feature.
These experiences are expected to span everything “from routine consumer purchases to complex, high-value decisions.”
Yet technical hurdles remain in adopting agentic payments: today’s agents are still constrained “by their inability to complete transactions without human intervention.”
This is because the current system assumes a human “is always present to press “Buy”—which breaks down when software takes the wheel.”
While authentication (verifying who you are) is “well-established, authorization (what an agent is allowed to do) is a challenge.”
Users must click external links and complete the checkout process manually on retailer websites, highlighting “a gap between intelligent shopping assistance and true agentic commerce, where AI would execute transactions independently.”
Without a clear mandate from the user, agentic payments “may face challenges like false declines, friction requiring human intervention and new security risks.”
And, with the launch of Visa Intelligent Commerce late last month, Visa is providing the “underlying payments infrastructure to allow for broader AI agent integration across verticals and industries.”
As part of the partnership, Nekuda expects to “integrate its AI payment stack to Visa Intelligent Commerce infrastructure designed to enable fast, authenticated agent payments with high authorization rates, to help ensure every transaction is secure and user-intended.”
Nekuda’s SDK brings agent-driven transactions into “the existing payment ecosystem without requiring a full overhaul.”
It’s built around two core pillars:
- Agent Wallet – Users can delegate payment credentials to an AI agent in a safe, compliant way. The agent can store and inject payment details securely at checkout, ensuring it can complete transactions autonomously without constantly asking for a human’s input.
- Agentic Mandates – Nekuda’s authorization layer captures rich, contextual signals about user purchasing intent—what the agent is allowed to buy, under which conditions, with spending limits or required approvals. This mandate becomes a transparent, verifiable message that can be passed which the rest of the payment stack can trust.