Sapiom reels in $15.75M to equip AI agents with payment features – News

Artificial intelligence tooling startup Sapiom Inc. has raised $15.75 million in seed funding from a consortium led by Accel.

The investment, which was announced on Thursday, also included the participation of Alphabet Inc.’s Gradient fund, Anthropic PBC, Coinbase Ventures and Okta Ventures. The tech firms were joined by several institutional backers along with a group of angel investors.

AI agents often use third-party cloud services to complete tasks. Those cloud services’ billing models don’t always align with the requirements of agent developers. For example, a managed database may require a sizable upfront spending commitment even if an agent only needs to use it a few times per month.

Sapiom provides a cloud platform that enables AI agents to access tools under a usage-based billing model. According to the company, that arrangement removes the need for developers to purchase software they may not need. It also avoids the complexity of managing tools with different billing models. A service that is accessed with pre-paid usage credits has to be managed differently than one tied to a subscription.

The platform enables developers to avoid cost overruns by setting a budget for each agent tool. There’s also support for more granular cost controls. The platform makes it possible to specify how much an agent may spend per run or during a specific user-defined time interval.

Sapiom automatically ends an agent session when it reaches its spending limit. Alternatively, developers can configure the platform to continue the session but send an alert to administrators. The latter arrangement ensures that small budget overruns don’t interrupt important tasks.

The company also promises to ease other aspects of AI agent development. Agents usually interact with third-party tools via application programming interfaces. Those APIs, in turn, each have an API key, a piece of data with a similar role as a password. Sapiom says that its platform automates the manual work involved in managing and securing API keys.

On launch, the company’s platform includes multiple pay-as-you-go tools that agents can use for tasks such as searching the web. Sapiom also provides access to more than 400 AI models. Agents can use those models to generate code, create images and generate other output. 

“If an agent can safely spend, it can access anything – compute, data, inference, messaging, and the long tail of specialized services – without waiting for prebuilt integrations or vendor-by-vendor onboarding,” Sapiom founder and Chief Executive Officer Ilan Zerbib (pictured) wrote in a blog post. “Sapiom is making that possible today.”

Sapiom is not the only startup working to ease AI-related billing tasks. In September, Paid.ai Inc. raised $21.6 million for a platform that enables agent developers to charge customers based on the savings delivered by their software. They can also account for other factors such as the amount of infrastructure an agent uses to complete tasks.

Anthropic, a Sapiom investor, and OpenAI Group PBC both provide features that make it easier to integrate AI agents powered by their models with external tools. Currently, those features focus on use cases such as preventing agents from entering erroneous data into tools. It’s possible Anthropic and OpenAI will also seek to simplify tool-related billing tasks in the future, which would create more competition for standalone agent payment platforms.

Photo: Sapiom