J.P. Morgan Payments and Mastercard have invested in Firmly, a Seattle-area commerce infrastructure company building technology to connect merchants with AI shopping agents and other emerging digital sales channels.
JPMorgan and Mastercard Back firmly
Firmly raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Squarepoint Capital, with participation from Samsung Next, ARK Invest, Alumni Ventures and several other investors. The funding brings the company’s total capital raised to around $20 million.
The investment comes as agentic commerce moves rapidly from experiment to commercial deployment, creating a new integration problem for merchants that need to connect product catalogues, inventory, payments and checkout infrastructure across a growing number of AI assistants and commerce platforms.
One Connection for Multiple Commerce Channels
Firmly’s answer is its Connect platform, which provides merchants with a common infrastructure layer for selling through AI assistants, marketplaces, social networks, publishers and other commerce destinations.
The company says the platform can connect merchants without requiring a fresh engineering project for every new channel.
Crucially, merchants retain their existing payment providers, customer relationships, transaction data and merchant-of-record status.
Firmly says Connect can currently give third-party commerce channels access to more than 11 million merchants representing over $900 billion in gross merchandise value.
The company plans to use the new funding to expand that infrastructure globally.
Mastercard Deepens Commercial Relationship
Mastercard is not only an investor but also a commercial partner.
Firmly provides the merchant-side infrastructure for Mastercard Agent Connect, a service designed to connect merchants, AI agents and payment providers through a single integration.
That relationship gives Firmly a potentially important distribution route as Mastercard recruits merchants into its agentic commerce ecosystem.
The company says merchant integration times have fallen sharply, from four to six weeks in 2024 to a day or less today, including testing.
Firmly Extends AI Shopping to Merchant Websites
Alongside the funding announcement, Firmly has launched Ask Agent, a conversational shopping service for retailers’ own websites.
The tool allows customers to describe what they want in natural language, receive recommendations from a live product catalogue and complete checkout without leaving the conversation.
The strategic challenge for merchants is increasingly clear: AI is creating new storefronts faster than retailers can reasonably integrate them individually.
Firmly’s proposition is therefore less about building another shopping agent and more about becoming the connective layer behind them. If agentic commerce scales, the infrastructure winners may be those that let merchants participate everywhere without surrendering control of checkout, payments or the customer relationship.
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