JPMorgan and Mastercard back Seattle startup Firmly’s bet on AI shopping

Seattle-area e-commerce startup Firmly raised a $15 million Series A round to expand software that links online retailers directly to AI shopping assistants, third-party marketplaces, and other distributed checkout channels without requiring custom engineering integrations for each endpoint. Led by Squarepoint Capital, the financing included strategic backing from J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard, and Samsung Next, as detailed in GeekWire Startups's report. Alongside the capital announcement, Firmly introduced Ask Agent, an AI shopping assistant designed to run natively on merchants' own storefronts so consumers can discover products and complete purchases inside a single conversational chat window.

This guide details Firmly's Series A financing terms, operational pricing structure, technical architecture, and merchant deployment requirements for e-commerce executives, retail software architects, and payments engineers. With institutional backing from major payment networks and financial institutions, the round highlights how merchant-authorized data integrations are emerging as an alternative to automated web scraping as autonomous AI agents enter consumer commerce.

The deal behind JPMorgan and Mastercard back Seattle startup

Squarepoint Capital led the $15 million Series A investment alongside J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard, and Samsung Next. The round also drew support from an expanded roster of venture firms, including Alumni Ventures, ARK Invest, Benhamou Global Ventures, Granada Funds, Hike Ventures, The Mercantile Companies, and Versus Ventures. The new funding brings Firmly's cumulative capital raised to approximately $20 million since its founding in 2019. The company had previously secured $5.2 million around the time it formed a partnership with Perplexity in March 2025 to power in-app conversational shopping transactions inside the search engine.

Beyond providing equity capital, Mastercard operates as a commercial partner for Firmly. Firmly powers the merchant-facing infrastructure for Mastercard Agent Connect, a service rolled out in September to bridge merchants, payment providers, and automated AI shopping agents through a unified integration interface. Under this commercial structure, Mastercard actively recruits merchants for the Agent Connect platform, creating a structured acquisition pipeline for Firmly’s enterprise client base.

Why JPMorgan and Mastercard back Seattle startup raised

Firmly raised the round to address the mounting technical complexity facing retailers as autonomous AI assistants and external shopping applications proliferate. Connecting an existing catalog to multiple independent discovery interfaces requires maintaining synchronized inventory levels, harmonized product listings, localized payment routing, and uninterrupted checkout flows across every destination. Firmly co-founder and chief executive officer Kumar Senthil explained that every new AI assistant or digital marketplace represents an incremental sales channel, but building separate custom integrations for each destination imposes heavy engineering burdens that many online merchants cannot maintain.

The company's software resolves this operational friction by connecting a merchant's digital storefront directly to third-party endpoints while allowing retailers to retain their existing merchant-of-record status, established payment processors, and primary customer relationships. On the technical execution side, Firmly reduced customer onboarding timelines from four to six weeks in 2024 to a single day or less, a window that includes full end-to-end sandbox testing before production release.

What the JPMorgan and Mastercard back Seattle startup money

Firmly is directing the Series A proceeds toward expanding its merchant network and scaling software that serves existing enterprise customers, which include Best Buy, Furniture.com, and Backcountry. The startup's underlying technology also powers transactional flows for coupon platform RetailMeNot as well as Wizard, an AI-powered shopping application. Under its current commercial model, Firmly bills retailers a recurring software fee between $2,000 and $15,000 per month, tiered according to the aggregate gross merchandise volume processed across connected channels.

The capital will also support ongoing development of Ask Agent, Firmly’s newly launched conversational shopping assistant deployed directly on retailer storefronts. Ask Agent allows shoppers to describe the specific items they need in natural language, view personalized product recommendations, and complete purchases entirely within the conversational module without navigating through traditional catalog category pages or multi-step shopping carts. The development team is guided by Senthil, who spent eight years at Microsoft before directing e-commerce product divisions at Samsung, co-founder Damien Balsan, a co-founder of mobile payments firm LoopPay prior to its acquisition by Samsung, and chief technology officer Murali Krishnamurthy, previously chief technical architect for Samsung’s global e-commerce systems.

Competitive context for JPMorgan and Mastercard back Seattle startup

Firmly’s funding lands as consumer-facing AI agents accelerate broader retail rollouts, triggering operational resistance and legal conflict from major e-commerce platforms. Meta launched its Muse assistant to browse external retail websites and purchase merchandise upon obtaining user confirmation. In response, Amazon blocked Muse from crawling its retail domain and filed a lawsuit against Perplexity regarding automated purchasing agents operating inside the startup's Comet browser environment.

Unlike client-side web scraping bots that simulate user navigation and click through storefront HTML interfaces, Firmly relies strictly on authenticated, direct backend connections built with explicit retailer consent. This architecture ensures that catalogs, pricing, and active inventory stay synchronized through sanctioned data feeds rather than headless browser scripts that break under site redesigns or trigger defensive anti-bot mitigations.

Open questions on JPMorgan and Mastercard back Seattle startup

A primary operational question centers on how quickly Firmly can expand its roster beyond mid-tier retailers to sign mega-marketplaces that remain wary of ceding discovery traffic to third-party AI assistants. While Best Buy and Backcountry provide strong proof of enterprise viability, closed retail ecosystems that invest heavily in on-site advertising may resist offloading checkout flows to external conversational agents, even when merchants retain underlying payment relationships.

A second challenge involves maintaining unit economics and platform performance across broader multi-agent ecosystems as Mastercard scales merchant acquisition for Agent Connect. While onboarding times have dropped to a day or less, Firmly must sustain real-time inventory precision and payment authorization reliability across dozens of consumer AI clients without encountering pricing pushback from merchants managing variable gross merchandise volume fee tiers.