🌱 Early-stage fintech · founder-funded · pre-seed

When agents do the shopping,
someone owns the wallet.

We're building the transaction infrastructure for agent-driven commerce: Paygent is a standards-native commerce agent that decides what to buy and pays with the right instrument, Paydapter orchestrates the payment across the processors merchants already use, and StellarBack turns every transaction into on-chain rewards customers actually own. Three engines. One platform.

The thesis

Commerce is moving to agents — and the open standard the industry is rallying behind defines a buyer-side layer nobody supplies: the agent that holds the wallet, optimizes the loyalty, and executes the payment. We build that layer, on rails we also own.

The Universal Commerce Protocol (Google, Shopify, 20+ payments partners) standardizes the merchant side. Stripe and Square own processing. Loyalty vendors bolt points on after the fact. Nobody owns the buyer-side agent + wallet + rewards layer where they all meet. That's the gap.

Market

Three markets, one platform.

New

Agentic commerce

The category every platform is racing toward; an open industry standard (UCP) launched with Google, Shopify, Visa, Mastercard and Stripe behind it — and the buyer-side layer unsupplied.

$10B+

Payment orchestration

A fast-growing category as platforms refuse single-processor lock-in (Spreedly, Primer, Gr4vy validate the buyer).

$200B+

Loyalty & rewards

Points sit as unloved balance-sheet liability; programs are siloed, expiring, and universally disliked.

Directional category sizes for discussion; detailed sizing in the data room.

The platform

Three engines that compound.

Each is a standalone business. Together they're a flywheel: the agent drives transactions, payments execute them, and rewards retain both sides.

Engine 1 · The demand layer

Paygent — the agentic commerce engine

A UCP-native buyer-side agent with a real wallet: it discovers products across connected catalogs, computes the best card by actual per-cart loyalty math, applies points as a live discount, and completes checkout autonomously when a price watch fires — with all money and points math kept deterministic and out of the model's hands.

  • Built on the open industry standard (UCP) — every compliant merchant is addressable by default
  • Pluggable wallet/loyalty provider: a bank's cards, a platform's balance, or our on-chain rewards
  • Three packagings of one core: embedded in a partner's app, white-label platform + SDKs, or an embeddable agent
  • Can run on local models — the deterministic core keeps inference costs near zero
See the product page →
Engine 2 · Revenue now

Paydapter — payment orchestration

One API to route transactions across Stripe, Square, PayPal and more — while every merchant keeps their own processor account.

  • Bring-your-own-PSP onboarding: zero switching cost, near-zero sales friction
  • We orchestrate, we never custody — light regulatory footprint
  • Platform fee per transaction: proven orchestration economics
See the product page →
Engine 3 · The moat

StellarBack — on-chain rewards infra

Rewards-as-a-service on Stellar: customers earn real, portable value with zero crypto friction — and can withdraw to self-custody anytime.

  • Pooled/muxed custody: micro-rewards at sub-cent cost, no per-user reserve
  • Interoperable across the network → coalition network effects
  • SaaS + issuance + float/breakage economics
See the product page →
The fusion: the agent decides, the rails execute, the rewards compound — Paygent drives transactions through Paydapter's orchestration and can plug StellarBack in as its loyalty provider. A stack neither processors, loyalty vendors, nor agent startups can copy without rebuilding all three layers.
What's already built

Years of hard engineering, de-risked.

This is not a slideware platform. The difficult primitives exist and run today.

Agentic commerce
UCP-compliant commerce engine: orchestration, product discovery, checkout, and the UCP Loyalty Extension end-to-end
Autonomous purchasing: price-watch-triggered checkout with loyalty redemption applied
Transactional loyalty escrow with real-time redemption at payment
Best-card recommendation from real per-card earning on the live cart — server-computed, never model-generated
Pluggable LLM runtime: local or hosted models, swapped by configuration
Payments
Multi-PSP routing with native marketplace onboarding (Stripe Connect, Square & PayPal OAuth)
Production-shaped serverless gateway: attestation, auth, live/sandbox separation
Tap to Pay on iPhone acceptance in the merchant app
Rewards
Pooled + muxed Stellar custody with custodial → self-custody graduation
Apple Wallet NFC/VAS stack: Apple-issued pass certificates, issuance pipeline, and an Android pass reader validated against commercial terminals
Proximity R&D
Cross-platform proximity transport: working Wi-Fi Aware on Android + iOS 26
UWB precise-distance transaction bounding (anti-relay)
Proximity engagement layer: geofence + beacon + Apple Wallet lock-screen channel
P2P proximity payments prototype ("AirDrop for money") integrated with a major bank's payments API
Defensibility

Why this holds.

🤖Standards-native, first

Built on UCP from day one — including one of the first end-to-end implementations of its loyalty extension. As the standard spreads, every compliant merchant becomes addressable supply; we don't pay for that integration surface, the ecosystem builds it.

⚖️Bank-grade agent architecture

"Agents get judgment, money gets math" — deterministic escrow, idempotent checkout, verifiable spend mandates. The trust architecture agent-commerce will be regulated into, built before the regulation.

🧲Distribution wedge incumbents can't match

"Keep your processor" removes the #1 objection in payments sales. Orchestration rides existing PSP relationships instead of fighting them.

🕸️Coalition network effects

Every merchant added makes the shared reward currency more valuable to every customer — classic two-sided compounding, on infrastructure we operate.

🏗️Architecture that's genuinely hard

Scale-economical on-chain custody (pooled/muxed) plus crypto-invisible UX with a real ownership off-ramp — a combination none of the points vendors or wallets ship.

📜Patent-grade proximity IP

EMV-over-BLE transport and UWB-bounded authorization from our R&D lineage — defensive IP around the proximity acceptance layer.

🤝Cross-platform, early

Working Wi-Fi Aware payments on iOS 26 + Android puts us ahead of the field on the first true Android↔iPhone proximity rail — the objection that stalls every Apple-only competitor.

Business model

Four ways the platform earns.

🤖

Agent platform

Embedded/white-label licensing plus per-checkout fees on agent-completed transactions.

💳

Orchestration fees

Platform fee per routed transaction on merchants' own PSP accounts.

🪙

Rewards SaaS + issuance

Program fees, issuance volume, and float/breakage economics on the reward asset.

🌐

Network take rate

Coalition membership and cross-merchant redemption fees as the network compounds.

Sequencing

Deployment first. Moat in parallel. Consumer when earned.

Partner-funded work and orchestration revenue pay for the strategic build — we don't burn capital waiting for the market.

Phase 1 · Now

Paygent to first deployment + Paydapter to revenue

Harden the agentic engine in a first partner deployment; ship the merchant dashboard and first platform/ISV customers on orchestration.

KPI: partner deployment live · routed volume
Phase 2 · Parallel

Platform + StellarBack to mainnet

Generalize the wallet/loyalty provider into the white-label platform + SDKs; webhook-driven earn/redeem loop; legal structure for custody & withdrawals.

KPI: tenants · rewards issued · partner integrations
Phase 3 · Earned

The consumer network

ShakeToPay bundle launched through a captive-network pilot (QSR chain / campus), plus P2P "AirDrop for money" white-labeled to bank partners — distribution solved before we spend on it.

KPI: repeat usage · coalition spend
Who's building this

Payments-native, from the card rails up.

Founded by Ming-Li Liu — 25+ years engineering payment systems end to end. Proof-of-concept engineer at Visa, where the job was turning payment hypotheses into working demos presented at the industry's flagship conferences. Director of Engineering at SimplyTapp, the company behind host card emulation — the technology that made NFC payments possible on phones without secure-element hardware. Co-founder and CTO of Zenius Solutions, taking contactless and NFC payment products from prototype to production. PayFac onboarding and risk infrastructure at Poynt (GoDaddy). From smart-card firmware and NFC chip specifications to cloud gateways and mobile apps — the full payment stack, in one set of hands.

25+ years in payments Visa HCE pioneer team (SimplyTapp) Co-founder & CTO (Zenius) NFC/EMV at spec level
Where we are

Founder-funded and building. Open to early believers.

We're not running a formal raise — we're heads-down taking the agentic engine to its first partner deployment and Paydapter to first revenue. But if you invest in early fintech infrastructure and this thesis resonates, we'd genuinely like to meet before we're "in market." Early conversations shape the company.

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