People without a coding background are finding they can build their own custom apps using so-called vibe coding — solutions like Lovable that turn plain-language descriptions into working code.
While these direct-coding tools can help create nice prototypes, launching them into full-scale production (as this reporter recently discovered) can be difficult without figuring out how to connect the app to external technology services, such as those that can send text messages via SMS, email, and process Stripe payments.
Ilan Zerbib, who spent five years as Shopify’s director of payments engineering, is building a solution that could eliminate these backend infrastructure headaches for non-technical creators.
Last summer, Zerbib launched Sapioma startup developing the financial layer that allows AI agents to purchase and securely access software, APIs, data and computation — essentially creating a payment system that allows AI to automatically purchase the services it needs.
Whenever an AI agent connects to an external tool like Twilio for SMS, it requires authentication and a micropayment. Sapiom’s goal is to make this whole process seamless, letting the AI agent decide what to buy and when without human intervention.
“In the future, apps will consume services that require payments. Right now, there’s no easy way for agents to actually access all of that,” said Amit Kumar, partner at Accel.
Kumar has met with dozens of startups in the AI payments space, but he believes Zerbib’s focus on the economics for businesses rather than consumers is what’s really needed to make AI agents work. That’s why Accel is leading Sapiom’s $15M seed round, with participation from Okta Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Array Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic and Coinbase Ventures.
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“If you really think about it, every API call is a payment. Every time you send a text message, it’s a payment. Every time you open a server for AWS, it’s a payment,” Kumar told TechCrunch.
While it’s still early days for Sapiom, the startup hopes its infrastructure solution will be adopted by vibe coding companies and other companies building AI agents that will eventually take on a lot of things for themselves.
For example, anyone who has vibe coded an SMS-enabled app won’t need to manually sign up for Twilio, add a credit card, and copy an API key into their code. Instead, Sapiom handles all of this in the background, and the person building the applet will be billed for Twilio’s services as a pass-through fee from Lovable, Bolt, or another vibe coding platform.
While Sapiom is currently focused on B2B solutions, its technology could eventually empower personal AI agents to handle consumer transactions. The expectation is that individuals will one day trust agents to make independent financial decisions, such as ordering an Uber or shopping on Amazon. While this future is exciting, Zerbib believes AI won’t make people buy more things, so he’s focusing on creating economic layers for businesses.
