Paygent Labs builds the infrastructure that lets AI shopping agents find products, recommend the highest-earning card, and help shoppers 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.
Commerce is moving to agents — and the bank or loyalty program that does not run its own agent cedes the wallet relationship to the platform that does. We build the white-label buyer-side agent they keep as their own: it holds their wallet, optimizes their loyalty, and shops on their customer's behalf.
The Universal Commerce Protocol (Google, Shopify, 20+ partners across retail and payments) standardizes the merchant side. Platform agents such as Google AI Mode and Gemini already buy under it, and the card networks supply the agent credentials that authorize each purchase. Stripe and Square own processing. Loyalty vendors bolt points on after the fact. What a bank or loyalty program lacks is a buyer-side agent it controls, so the customer relationship stays with it. That is the gap.
An emerging category, standardized by the Universal Commerce Protocol — launched with Google, Shopify, Visa, Mastercard and Stripe behind it — with room for a white-label buyer-side agent that banks and loyalty programs control.
A growing category as platforms refuse single-processor lock-in (Spreedly, Primer, Gr4vy validate the buyer).
Points sit as unloved balance-sheet liability; programs are siloed, expiring, and universally disliked.
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.
A UCP-native buyer-side agent with a real wallet: it discovers products across connected catalogs, computes the highest-earning card from actual per-cart loyalty math, applies points at checkout — with all money and points math kept deterministic and out of the model's hands.
Closed-loop branded points on Stellar, running on testnet today: customers earn and redeem with zero crypto friction. Live issuance and self-custody withdrawals wait on a custody legal opinion.
One API to route transactions across Stripe, Square, PayPal and more — while every merchant keeps their own processor account.
The difficult
primitives already exist.
We are now assembling them into the platform.
✓ built · ◐ in progress
“Agents get judgment, money gets math.” The architecture principle behind everything we build.
Built on UCP from day one, with a loyalty model shaped on its loyalty extension; public discovery pending. As the standard spreads, the ecosystem builds the integration surface; we do not pay for it.
Deterministic escrow, idempotent checkout, verifiable spend mandates — the model never touches the money math. Built for the kind of oversight agent commerce is likely to face.
"Keep your processor" is meant to take processor switching off the table in a sales conversation. Orchestration rides existing PSP relationships instead of fighting them.
Every merchant added makes the shared reward currency more valuable to every customer — classic two-sided compounding, on infrastructure we operate.
Scale-economical on-chain custody (pooled/muxed) plus crypto-invisible UX with a self-custody off-ramp designed in, gated on a custody legal opinion — a combination we have not seen points vendors or wallets ship. And an integrity layer underneath: the gateway mints only against a signed earn attestation it verifies itself, forged and replayed earns are refused, and every mint and burn is on the ledger. Attribution of sale credit is on the roadmap.
Embedded/white-label licensing plus per-checkout fees on agent-completed transactions.
Platform fee per routed transaction on merchants' own PSP accounts.
Program fees and issuance volume on the reward asset.
Coalition membership and cross-merchant redemption fees as the network compounds.
Founder-funded today; a first design partner, grant, or investor funds the path to production — we do not burn capital waiting for the market.
The agentic engine and rewards loop run on Stellar testnet. Recorded demo of the rewards loop on testnet: watch it. Next, a first design partner to take it to production, and the Paygent agent SDK released publicly with the wallet-agent contract and conformance harness.
Generalize the wallet/loyalty provider into the white-label platform and client SDKs; take the control plane from tenant registry to operated provisioning and billing; webhook-driven earn/redeem loop. This phase, including self-custody withdrawals, is gated on a custody legal opinion. Paydapter orchestration and its merchant dashboard follow when merchant demand appears.
ShakeToPay bundle launched through a captive-network pilot (QSR chain / campus), plus P2P "AirDrop for money" white-labeled for banks — distribution solved before we spend on it.
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.
Visa · ViVOtech · Co-founder & CTO, Zenius Solutions · Director of Software Engineering, SimplyTapp · OV Loop · Poynt (GoDaddy) · Founder, MysDeFi
We are not running a formal raise — we are heads-down taking the rewards platform to its first design partner and the agent SDK to a public release. 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.