There’s crazy hiring spree in AI and Agent building - solo founder adding more headcount or fund raising. Sharing some thoughts on choosing the right one :)
OpenRouter worked because nobody wanted to wire up every model provider. Same logic for stores. Excited to see agents buying across DoorDash, Amazon and Shopify through one call. Curious how returns and refunds work across all of them.
today we are announcing openrouter for commerce: opencommerce.sh
a single endpoint that integrates 5k stores, including Doordash, Amazon and most shopify stores, with payments using Agentcard (Stripe Link and Shop coming soon).
we built opencommerce to solve 3 problems:
* coverage: one endpoint to integrate 5k stores. agentic purchasing is a core feature for most personal assistants, but not their main business. searching for products and buying on behalf of users shouldn’t be as painful as it is today (e.g. it shouldn’t involve browser automations or dealing with PSPs). opencommerce solves that: 1 tool, every online store.
* reliability: 100% uptime. the challenge with browser automations is that they fail (e.g. captchas, bot-detection, etc). we run thousands of tests every couple of hours on every one of the stores to guarantee that the integration works when your user tries to buy something.
* speed: responses in under 10s. consumers are used to Amazon speed, and agentic purchases have so far felt like a downgrade. most agents spend minutes finding products before they come back with results. we monitor speed and improve it constantly.
Ujwal retweeted
If you are building in agentic payments, you need to deeply understand commerce; the participants, shared responsibilities, competing & shared incentives. Getting these to a workable equilibrium is a tightrope walk.
To really scale agentic payments you need to appreciate that agentic commerce needs to find a new equilibrium and your job is to help get there.
It's a reverse game theory problem.
It’s wild how LLMs are coming up with their own takes on what counts as recognition and a safe payment.
I think PMs have the same split. The ones I'd bet on aren't waiting for a playbook, they're just building small tools for themselves and having fun.
The others are busy saying no to everything and calling it critical thinking :)
I'm starting to sense a divide in the tech industry:
- People thriving on autonomy who are reinventing how they work and what tools they use with AI: LOTS of work, but they're enjoying it and getting very efficient
- People used to being mentored / trained / or simply told what to do and how. Frustrated with the lack of guidance from management on what to do with AI; also frustrated by seeing some of their peers thriving; increasingly bitter about AI and the state of the industry, as a whole
Neither group seems to be aware that there's another group, or have empathy for the other group
It's my first time creating a Microsoft account, and I'm trying to figure out who's using Microsoft Office with SSO. These two things don't really mesh well in on
SF and the Peninsula already feel like different planets, never mind the rest of the country. San Mateo has the coffee, Belmont has the quiet, and Palo Alto has the VCs who'll tell you it's a feature, not a company.
And just like that @hexanalytics raised a massive round. This list is getting hot. 🚀
nitter.cf/hexanalytics/status/21…
Startups to watch out in Agentic Commerce cosign.co/questions/startups…
Spoiler alert: It went viral.
Main point: This list is crowd-sourced, meaning if you’re a trending startup, the mob adds you and gives you a cosign.
Bottom line: I started this because I felt like it, but now it’s actually useful for the X masses. 🎉
Startups to watch out in Agentic Commerce cosign.co/questions/startups…