firmly's $15M Series A and what agentic commerce means for merchants
Seattle-based firmly has raised a $15 million Series A led by Squarepoint Capital, bringing its total funding to about $20 million. The November 5 announcement came with a strategic investor list that is hard to ignore: J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard and Samsung NEXT, alongside ARK Invest, Alumni Ventures and several others.
Fifteen million dollars is a modest round by 2026 standards. But firmly sits at the centre of one of the biggest open questions in e-commerce right now. When AI agents start doing the shopping, who connects them to the millions of stores they need to buy from? And how do merchants avoid losing their customers in the process?
The problem: every agent speaks a different language
"Agentic commerce" describes AI assistants that search, compare and buy on a shopper's behalf. It has moved quickly from concept to traffic. Adobe Analytics reported that AI-referred visits to US retail sites rose 393% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, and that those visits now convert about 42% better than other traffic, according to Wikipedia's summary of the data.
McKinsey estimates that up to $1 trillion of US retail revenue could be orchestrated by agents by 2030.
The infrastructure underneath is messy. As PYMNTS points out, every AI assistant, marketplace and social platform connects to merchants differently. Several competing standards are still being adopted:
the Agentic Commerce Protocol, from OpenAI and Stripe
Google's Universal Commerce Protocol and its Agent Payments Protocol
Mastercard's Agent Connect
Agents also buy in two very different ways. Some drive a web browser like a human would, clicking through a store's checkout. Others use structured protocols that talk to the merchant's systems directly.
For a large retailer with a big engineering team, supporting all of that is expensive but doable. For a mid-sized brand on Shopify or a custom stack, rebuilding catalog, inventory, pricing, payments and checkout integrations for every new channel is not realistic.
What firmly does
firmly's answer is a single no-code layer called firmly Connect. A merchant connects its existing commerce systems once. firmly then handles the translation to AI assistants, marketplaces, social networks, publishers and shoppable ads. The company says the network reaches more than 11 million merchants representing over $900 billion in gross merchandise volume.
The key design choice is who stays in charge. Through firmly, merchants remain the merchant of record. They keep their own payment provider, their customer relationships and their transaction data. That is a big deal. In many marketplace models, the platform owns the customer, and the brand becomes an anonymous supplier. As AI agents become the new storefront, brands are worried about the same thing happening again.
Co-founder and CEO Kumar Senthil sums up the goal: "Our north star has always been to enable the merchants to sell in any channel with ZERO engineering effort."
Alongside the round, firmly launched Ask Agent, a conversational shopping assistant for merchants' own websites. Shoppers describe what they want in plain language. Ask Agent recommends products from the live catalog, with real-time pricing and inventory, and lets them check out without leaving the chat. It also handles loyalty, cross-sell and post-purchase support.
It installs with a single line of JavaScript. firmly says early deployments saw conversion gains of up to 18% and average order value increases of up to 23%. Those are company figures and "up to" numbers, but they show what the product is meant to do.
Why payments giants are investing
The strategic investors explain a lot about this round. Mastercard named firmly a launch partner when it unveiled Agent Connect in September. J.P. Morgan Payments processes trillions of dollars a year for merchants. Both have a strong interest in agentic checkout running on rails they understand, with clear authentication, fraud controls and liability rules.
There is a defensive angle too. If a handful of AI platforms end up owning both the customer interface and the checkout, they could squeeze payment networks and acquirers the way app stores squeezed mobile developers. An independent, merchant-side connection layer keeps the existing payments ecosystem in the loop. Samsung NEXT's involvement points to another channel: devices and on-device assistants as places where buying happens.
What merchants should do now
For e-commerce leaders, firmly's raise is a useful prompt to get ready for agent-driven shopping, whatever tool they use:
Clean up product data. Agents choose products based on structured attributes, not glossy photos. Accurate titles, specs, sizes, materials and availability now matter more than ever.
Expose real-time inventory and pricing. An agent that recommends an out-of-stock item, or quotes the wrong price, damages trust fast.
Measure AI referral traffic separately. Track visits and orders from AI assistants as their own channel to see how they convert and what they buy.
Protect the customer relationship. Whatever integration you use, insist on remaining merchant of record and receiving customer and order data.
Review fraud and returns policies. Orders placed by agents look different from human orders. Payment teams should prepare for new patterns of authentication and disputes.
The risks
firmly is in a crowded and fast-moving space. Commerce platforms such as Shopify, as well as payment processors like Stripe, are building their own agent integrations. Large AI platforms may prefer direct relationships with major retailers over going through an intermediary. If one protocol wins outright, some of the value of a translation layer could shrink.
There is also a scale question. $20 million in total funding is small for a company trying to become shared infrastructure for an entire market. firmly will need fast merchant adoption and strong partnerships to keep up with much larger competitors.
What to watch
firmly says it will use the funds to expand firmly Connect globally and reach more AI agents, marketplaces, social networks and ad platforms. The signals worth tracking:
which major AI assistants and marketplaces announce firmly integrations
independent data on how agent-placed orders convert and how often they are returned
whether one agentic commerce protocol emerges as the standard
how quickly mid-market brands adopt Ask Agent on their own sites
Co-founder and President Damien Balsan describes firmly as "the infrastructure layer that bridges the gap" between human-led and agent-led shopping. If agentic commerce grows the way forecasts suggest, that bridge could become one of the most valuable pieces of plumbing in retail.