Skyfire has announced rapid and significant growth as the world’s only payment network specifically designed for the AI Agent economy. This innovative platform enables fully autonomous transactions across AI agents, large language models (LLMs), data platforms, online retail, service providers, and more. Following its launch, Skyfire has begun processing payments between AI agents and businesses, including LLM aggregators and large-scale financial services. The company also secured new funding from Coinbase Ventures and a16z CSX.
CEO Insights on Market Demand
“When we launched Skyfire, we knew we were addressing a critical gap in AI, but the speed and scale of adoption across industries have significantly exceeded our expectations,” said Amir Sarhangi, co-founder and CEO of Skyfire. “Every day, we’re onboarding new partners into our payment network, empowering them to build thousands of AI agents capable of transacting seamlessly using Skyfire.”
Sarhangi emphasized the urgency for businesses in the AI economy: “Many AI experts said that the growth of agents would outpace human consumers in the next five years; based on our conversations, that’s a dramatic understatement. If you’re operating in any part of the AI economy and not integrating payments, you’re getting left behind.”
Skyfire’s Unique Offerings
Launched just over a month ago, Skyfire addresses the missing operating layer for agent-to-agent and agent-to-business payments. Key features include:
- Secure Wallet Access: Ensures safe transactions for AI agents.
- Verifiable Agent Identity: Establishes trust and authenticity for transactions.
- Open Payment Protocol: Facilitates service requests, purchasing decisions, and instant transactions without human intervention, complete with guardrails for agent spending.
This innovative payment network enables businesses to monetize their products and services to AI agents, the fastest-growing market of consumers.
New Partnerships
Recent businesses joining the Skyfire payment network include:
- Emergence AI: Pioneering autonomous AI agents that enhance enterprise workflows.
- Pricing Culture: Offers data products providing context on cultural asset prices.
- Venice AI: Provides access to private, censorship-free LLMs for diverse applications.
- Micro1: A recruitment engine for sourcing and vetting global teams.
- Vetric: Delivers scalable, real-time data enrichment solutions.
- OpenRouter: Aggregates access to over 160 LLMs for optimal model selection.
- Net Nut: Offers a suite of proxy services through its parent company, Alarum Technologies Ltd.
Satya Nitta, Co-Founder and CEO of Emergence AI, stated, “Our partnership with Skyfire allows us to seamlessly integrate their advanced payment network into our Orchestrator platform, enabling us to adopt and test autonomous payment transactions.”
Integration with Base Blockchain
Skyfire is now integrated with Base, the Ethereum layer 2 blockchain incubated at Coinbase, which allows for low-cost payment rails for all agent payments. Transactions on Base typically cost less than 1 cent, making on-chain transactions driven by AI more accessible to enterprise customers. Skyfire allows any AI agent to use the Coinbase wallet for value storage and transaction processing.
Funding and Future Prospects
The integration with Base aligns with a new investment from Coinbase Ventures, which joins Skyfire’s recently announced seed round. The company has also received funding from the a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator, bringing its total funding to $9.5 million.
Craig DeWitt, Skyfire co-founder, stated, “Skyfire is essentially Visa for the AI economy. This powerful piece of infrastructure will be critical to the success of AI agents. Traditional payment rails were never built to transact at AI scale—globally, instantly, and at fractions of a penny—which is what makes our approach to verifiable agent identities and USDC transactions transformative.”