Some of the founders who helped build online shopping are now preparing for AI agents to do the buying.
The group includes Marc Lore, who sold Jet.com to Walmart, and Scot Wingo, who took e-commerce software company ChannelAdvisor public. Alongside veterans of Ripple and Visa, they’re building shopping assistants, tools that help products appear in AI recommendations, and payment systems for agents.
Using CB Insights People data, we profiled 14 repeat founders across 9 agentic commerce companies that raised deals recently. Here’s what stands out about the companies they’re building:
- Mastercard connects most of this group: 12 of the 14 founders, across 7 companies from Skyfire to ReFiBuy, joined Mastercard Start Path’s inaugural Agentic Commerce & Services program in September. Only COFE Tech (a Series C at a $178M valuation) and Azoma (a strategic investment from dunnhumby ventures) raised outside the program.
- Payments and Web3 veterans are building the rails: 4 of the 9 companies (Skyfire, Nevermined, PayOS, and SolvaPay) build payment or identity infrastructure for agents. Their founders came from Ripple, Visa, the Ocean Protocol data marketplace, and Stockholm’s Web3 scene. Skyfire and Nevermined, both with crypto roots, now route agent payments over card networks as well as stablecoins.
- E-commerce veterans are building for both merchants and shoppers: Scot Wingo (ChannelAdvisor, IPO in 2013) is building agentic commerce optimization tools that shape how AI agents read and recommend products. Marc Lore, who sold Quidsi to Amazon and Jet to Walmart, is betting on the agent itself with Wizard.
CB Insights customers can see 60+ repeat founders in agentic commerce here.
What makes these founders stand out
The former Fraunhofer researcher showing brands like L’Oréal how AI agents pick products
Timur Luguev — Azoma
Luguev founded ClevAPI, an image recognition company for in-image advertising, and previously worked as a machine learning researcher at Fraunhofer IIS. He later led a software engineering team at 4AG Robotics, which builds automated mushroom-harvesting systems, and was a founder in residence at Entrepreneur First before co-founding Azoma.
London-based Azoma, where Luguev is CTO and co-founder alongside Max Sinclair, measures and improves how AI shopping agents discover and recommend products. Its customers include L’Oréal, Unilever, and Mars.
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Agents will take over routine, repeat purchases first, in particular groceries, household essentials, and personal care, where convenience, price, and product preference matter more than the shopping experience itself.
Read our full interview with Azoma CTO Timur Luguev here.
The founder who turned a Kuwait coffee app into procurement agents for Gulf businesses
Ali Al Ebrahim — COFE Tech
Al Ebrahim founded Tmkeen, a youth entrepreneurship organization in Kuwait whose symposium has hosted speakers including Steve Wozniak.
COFE Tech, where Al Ebrahim is founder and CEO, started as a coffee ordering app in Kuwait and now sells AI agents that run enterprise procurement and e-commerce for 1K+ businesses across the Gulf. In September 2026, it raised a Series C round at a $178M valuation led by WAED Venture, Aramco’s venture arm, and is targeting a listing on the Saudi Exchange by 2029.
The 30-year payments veteran letting merchants sell through AI agents without changing their websites
Damien Balsan — firmly
Balsan spent roughly 30 years in payments and business development at Orange, Nokia, PayPal, and Samsung. He also co-founded GED Conexo Ventures, a fund focused on Southern European startups expanding to Latin America and the US.
His newest venture firmly lets merchants sell through AI agents and other digital channels without changing their websites. This is firmly’s second Mastercard Start Path cohort after the Emerging Fintech program in September 2025, and Perplexity integrated its checkout technology last March.
The Ocean Protocol trio building billing for AI agents across cards and stablecoins
Don Gossen, Aitor Argomaniz, & Dimitri De Jonghe — Nevermined
The three met while building decentralized data exchange Ocean Protocol, starting in 2017. Gossen and De Jonghe co-founded it, and Argomaniz was a founding member and VP of engineering. In 2019, the three co-founded Web3 firm Keyko, which incubated Nevermined.
Nevermined handles billing and settlement for AI agents across Stripe, USDC, and Visa cards. The company spun out of Keyko in 2022, is based in Zug, Switzerland, and lists Mastercard as a customer on its website.
The Visa alum behind the first live Mastercard agentic payment
Johnathan McGowan — PayOS
McGowan founded commercial real estate data platform Glacier Flow and worked on AI products for VisaNet at Visa.
His startup PayOS lets users link a card once so AI agents can check out and pay using network-issued tokens. In September 2025, PayOS and Mastercard completed what they described as the first live agentic payment using a Mastercard Agentic Token.
The ChannelAdvisor founder making sure AI shopping agents can find every product
Scot Wingo — ReFiBuy
Wingo co-founded e-commerce software company ChannelAdvisor, took it public in 2013, and then sold it to CommerceHub (now Rithum) in 2022. He also co-founded vehicle care company Spiffy and is a general partner at the Triangle Tweener Fund.
ReFiBuy, where Wingo is CEO, optimizes product catalogs so AI shopping agents can find and recommend each SKU. It raised a $13.6M seed round in May 2026, then joined Mastercard Start Path’s inaugural Agentic Commerce & Services cohort in September as one of 22 companies selected.
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Six months ago, we saw grocery really light up as the meal planner in the family realized you can use AI to do really advanced meal planning… Since then, we’ve seen electronics, the pet category, and sporting goods start moving. The current laggard categories would be auto parts and automotive.
Read our full interview with ReFiBuy CEO Scot Wingo here.
The Jibe and Ripple veterans giving AI agents their own IDs and payment credentials
Amir Sarhangi & Craig DeWitt — Skyfire
Sarhangi founded Jibe Mobile, which Google acquired in 2015 and whose messaging technology became the backbone of Android Messages. DeWitt spent 7 years at Ripple, leaving as senior director of product before co-founding NFT infrastructure startup Supermojo with Sarhangi in 2022.
Skyfire gives AI agents verified identity and payment credentials so they can sign up, log in, and pay online. Ripple and Circle invested in its $8.5M seed round in 2024, and Coinbase Ventures followed later that year. Most recently, Skyfire partnered with F5 and Fastly so that websites can verify agent identity before letting agent traffic through.
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The conventional wisdom today is that AI agents will integrate into APIs to transact and conduct commerce on behalf of users… Agents are actually best suited to use the same infrastructure humans already use, existing websites, logins, wallets, and checkout flows.
Read our full interview with Skyfire CEO Amir Sarhangi here.
The Stockholm pair helping software companies charge AI agents for access
Tommy Berglind & Viggo Stenseth — SolvaPay
Berglind co-founded booking platform Cliento, which Yabie acquired in 2022, and served as CTO at a series of startups, including Tessin, Wndy, and Scopes. Stenseth, SolvaPay’s CEO, founded Vokave and co-founded two Stockholm Web3 startups: Nordic Web3 media house Norn.xyz and Lingon Certificates, which issues blockchain-based digital product passports.
Stockholm-based SolvaPay lets SaaS companies, APIs, and MCP servers charge AI agents for access. The two co-founded it in 2025 with Ingemar Svensson. In April 2026, it raised a $2.8M pre-seed round led by Redstone and MS&AD Ventures, the venture arm of Japanese insurer MS&AD.
The Jet.com and Stylust founders building an AI agent that shops and checks out for you
Marc Lore & Melissa Bridgeford — Wizard
Lore co-founded Diapers.com, whose parent company Quidsi sold to Amazon at a $545M valuation, and founded e-commerce platform Jet, which Walmart acquired in 2016. He went on to run Walmart’s US e-commerce business and now runs meal platform Wonder. His co-founder Melissa Bridgeford previously founded Stylust, a text-to-buy shopping chatbot.
Wizard, where Bridgeford is CEO and Lore is chairman, is a consumer AI shopping agent that finds products across the web and checks out for shoppers. The company started in 2021, raised a $51M Series A that year led by NEA, and spent nearly five years in private beta before launching publicly in February 2026 with native checkout through Best Buy. In March, it joined Stripe’s early partners for the Agentic Commerce Protocol.
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