Is this is the future?
Skyfire lets AI agents spend your money
There's a lot of hype about the promise of AI agents today, but payments are a huge limiting factor. Today, an AI agent might be able to plan a vacation
There’s a lot of hype about the promise of AI agents today, but payments are a huge limiting factor. Today, an AI agent might be able to plan a vacation for you independently, but a human has to step in when it’s time to input your credit card information. Skyfire Systems wants to change that.
Skyfire created a payment network specifically for AI agents to make autonomous transactions. Now, obviously, AI agents are hard to control today, so the idea of one tied to your bank account is terrifying. However, Skyfire uses a number of safeguards to prevent AI agents from overspending, making the whole thing a little less scary.
Skyfire assigns each AI agent a digital wallet with a unique identifier, where businesses can deposit a set amount of funds they want the agent to spend, so they don’t get unlimited access to a bank account. Skyfire also allows customers to set limits in how much an AI agent can spend in one transaction and over time. If an AI agent tries to overspend, it will ping a human to review it. Skyfire also offers a dashboard to view exactly how much, and where, their agent is spending.
Skyfire’s co-founder and CEO Amir Sarhangi sold his last startup, Jibe, to Google, and the RCS messaging protocol Jibe helped pioneer became the standard for Android’s billion users. Now, he’s trying to develop an open protocol to power payments in the AI era.
“AI agents can’t do anything if they can’t make payments, it’s just a glorified search,” said Skyfire co-founder and Chief Product Officer Craig DeWitt in an interview with TechCrunch. “Either we figure out a way where agents are actually able to do things, or they don’t do anything, and therefore, they’re not agents.”
On Wednesday, Skyfire officially launched its payment network and announced $8.5 million in seed funding raised from Neuberger Berman, Inception Capital, Arrington Capital, and other investors. (Arrington Capital is led by Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, who left the publication in 2011.)
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