🌱 Early-stage fintech · founder-funded · pre-seed
The infrastructure behind AI commerce

When agents do the shopping,
someone owns the wallet.

Paygent Labs builds the infrastructure that lets AI shopping agents find products, pay with the best card, and earn rewards — wherever they shop.

Three platform layers make that work: the shopping agent, the payment rails behind it, and the rewards layer on top — each one strengthening the others.

Working technology
UCP commerce engine + loyalty extension Multi-processor orchestration — Stripe · Square · PayPal Autonomous checkout with loyalty redemption Stellar rewards custody Apple Wallet NFC passes Tap to Pay on iPhone
See everything that is built ↓
The thesis

Commerce is moving to agents — and the open standard the industry is rallying behind defines a buyer-side layer nobody supplies: the agent that holds the wallet, optimizes the loyalty, and executes the payment. We build that layer, on rails we also own.

The Universal Commerce Protocol (Google, Shopify, 20+ payments partners) standardizes the merchant side. Stripe and Square own processing. Loyalty vendors bolt points on after the fact. Nobody owns the buyer-side agent + wallet + rewards layer where they all meet. That is the gap.

Why now — three trends converging
Agents can buyAI agents are becoming capable of autonomous purchasing.
Merchants are standardizingUCP is making merchant interoperability a protocol, not an integration.
Rails are openingMerchants increasingly demand processor-agnostic payment infrastructure.
Market

Three markets, one platform.

New

Agentic commerce

An emerging category, standardized by the Universal Commerce Protocol — launched with Google, Shopify, Visa, Mastercard and Stripe behind it — with the buyer-side layer still unsupplied.

$10B+

Payment orchestration

A fast-growing category as platforms refuse single-processor lock-in (Spreedly, Primer, Gr4vy validate the buyer).

$200B+

Loyalty & rewards

Points sit as unloved balance-sheet liability; programs are siloed, expiring, and universally disliked.

Directional category sizes for discussion; detailed sizing in the data room.

The platform

Three engines that compound.

One integrated platform with a flywheel at its core: the agent drives transactions, payments execute them, and rewards retain both sides — and each layer opens its own revenue line along the way.

PaygentAI commerce agent — decides what to buy & how to pay
Paydapterpayment orchestration — executes the transaction
Merchants' existing processors
Stripe · Square · PayPal
StellarBackrewards layer — issues & redeems on-chain value
Stellar network
portable, customer-owned rewards
Engine 1 · The demand layer

Paygent — the agentic commerce engine

A UCP-native buyer-side agent with a real wallet: it discovers products across connected catalogs, computes the best card by actual per-cart loyalty math, applies points as a live discount, and completes checkout autonomously when a price watch fires — with all money and points math kept deterministic and out of the model's hands.

  • Built on the open industry standard (UCP) — every compliant merchant is addressable by default
  • Pluggable wallet/loyalty provider: a bank's cards, a platform's balance, or our on-chain rewards
  • Three packagings of one core: embedded in a partner's app, white-label platform + SDKs, or an embeddable agent
  • Can run on local models — the deterministic core keeps inference costs near zero
See the product page →
Engine 2 · Revenue now

Paydapter — payment orchestration

One API to route transactions across Stripe, Square, PayPal and more — while every merchant keeps their own processor account.

  • Bring-your-own-PSP onboarding: zero switching cost, near-zero sales friction
  • We orchestrate, we never custody — light regulatory footprint
  • Platform fee per transaction: proven orchestration economics
See the product page →
Engine 3 · The moat

StellarBack — on-chain rewards infra

Rewards-as-a-service on Stellar: customers earn real, portable value with zero crypto friction — and can withdraw to self-custody anytime.

  • Pooled/muxed custody: micro-rewards at sub-cent cost, no per-user reserve
  • Interoperable across the network → coalition network effects
  • Verifiable issuance & attribution: signed, provenance-carrying rewards — a structural defense against injected points and misassigned sale credit
  • SaaS + issuance + float/breakage economics
See the product page →
Together, an end-to-end commerce platform.
Paygent generates transactions. Paydapter monetizes transaction flow. StellarBack creates retention through portable rewards.
Each layer strengthens the others — a stack no processor, loyalty vendor, or agent startup can copy without rebuilding all three.
What is already built

Years of hard engineering, de-risked.

The difficult primitives already exist.
We are now assembling them into the platform.

Agentic commerce
UCP-compliant commerce engine: orchestration, product discovery, checkout, and the UCP Loyalty Extension end-to-end
Autonomous purchasing: price-watch-triggered checkout with loyalty redemption applied
Transactional loyalty escrow with real-time redemption at payment
Best-card recommendation from real per-card earning on the live cart — server-computed, never model-generated
Payments
Multi-PSP routing with native marketplace onboarding (Stripe Connect, Square & PayPal OAuth)
Production-shaped serverless gateway: attestation, auth, live/sandbox separation
Tap to Pay on iPhone acceptance in the merchant app
Rewards
Pooled + muxed Stellar custody with custodial → self-custody graduation
Apple Wallet NFC/VAS stack: Apple-issued pass certificates, issuance pipeline, and an Android pass reader validated against commercial terminals
Proximity R&D
Cross-platform proximity transport: working Wi-Fi Aware on Android + iOS 26
UWB precise-distance transaction bounding (anti-relay)
Proximity engagement layer: geofence + beacon + Apple Wallet lock-screen channel
P2P proximity payments prototype ("AirDrop for money") integrated with a major bank's payments API
Defensibility

Why this holds.

“Agents get judgment, money gets math.” The architecture principle behind everything we build.

🤖Standards-native, first

Built on UCP from day one — including one of the first end-to-end implementations of its loyalty extension. As the standard spreads, every compliant merchant becomes addressable supply; we do not pay for that integration surface, the ecosystem builds it.

⚖️Bank-grade agent architecture

Deterministic escrow, idempotent checkout, verifiable spend mandates — the model never touches the money math. The trust architecture agent-commerce will be regulated into, built before the regulation.

🧲Distribution wedge incumbents cannot match

"Keep your processor" removes the #1 objection in payments sales. Orchestration rides existing PSP relationships instead of fighting them.

🕸️Coalition network effects

Every merchant added makes the shared reward currency more valuable to every customer — classic two-sided compounding, on infrastructure we operate.

🏗️Architecture that is genuinely hard

Scale-economical on-chain custody (pooled/muxed) plus crypto-invisible UX with a real ownership off-ramp — a combination none of the points vendors or wallets ship. And an integrity layer underneath: issuance and attribution are verifiable on-ledger, closing off injected points and silently reassigned sale credit.

📡Deep proximity R&D

EMV-over-BLE transport and UWB-bounded authorization from years of hands-on R&D — hard-won engineering depth across the proximity acceptance layer.

🤝Cross-platform, early

Working Wi-Fi Aware payments on iOS 26 + Android puts us ahead of the field on the first true Android↔iPhone proximity rail — the objection that stalls every Apple-only competitor.

Business model

Four ways the platform earns.

🤖

Agent platform

Embedded/white-label licensing plus per-checkout fees on agent-completed transactions.

💳

Orchestration fees

Platform fee per routed transaction on merchants' own PSP accounts.

🪙

Rewards SaaS + issuance

Program fees, issuance volume, and float/breakage economics on the reward asset.

🌐

Network take rate

Coalition membership and cross-merchant redemption fees as the network compounds.

Sequencing

Deployment first. Moat in parallel. Consumer when earned.

Partner-funded work and orchestration revenue pay for the strategic build — we do not burn capital waiting for the market.

Phase 1 · Now

Paygent to first deployment + Paydapter to revenue

Harden the agentic engine in a first partner deployment; ship the merchant dashboard and first platform/ISV customers on orchestration.

KPI: partner deployment live · routed volume
Phase 2 · Parallel

Platform + StellarBack to mainnet

Generalize the wallet/loyalty provider into the white-label platform + SDKs; webhook-driven earn/redeem loop; legal structure for custody & withdrawals.

KPI: tenants · rewards issued · partner integrations
Phase 3 · Earned

The consumer network

ShakeToPay bundle launched through a captive-network pilot (QSR chain / campus), plus P2P "AirDrop for money" white-labeled to bank partners — distribution solved before we spend on it.

KPI: repeat usage · coalition spend
Who is building this

Payments-native, from the card rails up.

Founded by Ming-Li Liu — 25+ years engineering payment systems, from smart-card firmware to cloud gateways: the full stack, in one set of hands.

Proof-of-concept engineer, Visa · Director of Engineering, SimplyTapp (host card emulation) · Co-founder & CTO, Zenius Solutions · PayFac infrastructure, Poynt (GoDaddy)

Where we are

Founder-funded and building. Open to early believers.

We are not running a formal raise — we are heads-down taking the agentic engine to its first partner deployment and Paydapter to first revenue. But if you invest in early fintech infrastructure and this thesis resonates, we would genuinely like to meet before we are "in market." Early conversations shape the company.

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