Agentic Commerce Startup Firmly Secures $15M Series A to Connect Merchants with AI Storefronts

The rapid proliferation of AI assistants is creating a fragmented new landscape for digital commerce. As consumers increasingly rely on chatbots and autonomous agents to discover and purchase products, merchants face the impossible task of building custom integrations for every emerging AI platform. This shift threatens to lock traditional retailers out of the next generation of digital storefronts.

To bridge this gap, Seattle-based agentic commerce platform Firmly has secured a $15 million Series A led by Squarepoint Capital, with strategic backing from J.P. Morgan Payments and Mastercard. The startup provides a unified layer that connects merchant catalogs to high-intent digital channels, including AI agents and shoppable advertising platforms. Instead of managing dozens of API connections, retailers can use Firmly's infrastructure to make their inventory accessible and purchasable across the AI ecosystem without writing custom code.

Alongside the funding, Firmly launched Ask Agent, a conversational shopping interface designed for merchant websites. Unlike standard customer service bots that merely link to product pages, Ask Agent handles the entire transaction within the chat. It combines natural language product discovery with a real-time catalog and in-chat checkout capabilities, signaling a broader industry move away from traditional click-and-cart shopping toward conversational commerce.