Firmly Raises $15M to Connect Merchants to AI

The Seattle startup's Series A, led by Squarepoint Capital, funds expansion of its no-code platform linking retailers to AI shopping channels.

Updated on Nov. 5, 2026 in Business Strategy

Firmly Raises $15M to Connect Merchants to AI

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Seattle startup Firmly raised $15 million in a Series A led by Squarepoint Capital, with J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard and Samsung NEXT joining as strategic investors. The company also launched Ask Agent, a conversational shopping experience that merchants can add to their websites.

Why it matters

Every AI assistant, marketplace and social platform has its own way of asking a store what it sells and how to buy it, and most merchants lack the engineering resources to integrate with each one. Firmly's model aims to reduce that friction by letting destinations integrate once to reach many merchants.

Firmly Connect can reach more than 11 million merchants representing over $900 billion in gross merchandise volume, according to the company. Early Ask Agent deployments report conversion rate gains of up to 18% and average order value increases of up to 23%, though the sample size and measurement period were not disclosed.

The players

Firmly

A Seattle startup that connects merchants to AI shopping channels without requiring code, and the company that raised this Series A round.

Squarepoint Capital

An investment firm that led Firmly's $15 million Series A round.

Mastercard

A global payments network that named Firmly a partner when it launched Agent Connect and joined the Series A as a strategic investor.

J.P. Morgan Payments

The payments division of JPMorgan Chase that joined Firmly's Series A as a strategic investor.

The details

Firmly Connect integrates with a merchant's existing commerce infrastructure through one standardized connection, and the merchant remains merchant of record on every order. Ask Agent can be added to a merchant website with a single line of JavaScript, and Mastercard named Firmly a partner when it launched Agent Connect in September.

September: Mastercard launched Agent Connect and named Firmly a partner.
November 5, 2026: Firmly announced the $15 million Series A and launched Ask Agent.
This holiday season: Analysts expect AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites to grow 130% year over year.

Market Landscape

Firmly's raise comes as Mastercard's Agent Connect, launched in September, begins defining how payment networks plug into AI shopping agents, and Firmly positions itself as the merchant-side layer beneath those channels. Its partnership with Mastercard places it within an emerging competition among payments and commerce players to become the standard connection between retailers and AI assistants.

For shoppers, Ask Agent could mean conversational product discovery on the websites of participating merchants, though the stub does not specify rollout timing for consumers. For merchants, the single-line JavaScript integration and retained merchant-of-record status mean adoption requires little engineering effort and no change to who handles the order.

The takeaway

Merchants evaluating AI shopping channels can weigh integration effort and merchant-of-record terms alongside the early performance figures, which remain company-reported and unverified. Tracking independent results from deployments will show whether the reported conversion and order value gains hold up.