Skyfire launches to enable autonomous AI agents to spend money

A recent startup in San Francisco, Fire of Heavenlaunches in beta today with $8.5 million in seed funding to become the “Visa for AI” by empowering autonomous AI agents built by other companies with your money and letting them spend it while they go to work for you.

“We enable AI agents to autonomously make payments, receive payments, maintain balances,” Skyfire co-founder and CEO Amir Sarhangi said in a video interview with VentureBeat earlier this week. “Essentially, think of us as the FinTech infrastructure for AI.”

The company’s seed round was supported by Neuberger Berman, Brevan Howard Digital, Intersection Growth Partners, DRW, Inception Capital, Arrington Capital, RedBeard Ventures, Sfermion, Circle, FBG, Gemini, Crossbeam Venture Partners, EveryRealm, Draper Associates, ARCA, and Ripple.

Why should we give AI agents money to spend on our behalf via Skyfire?

Read on to learn how Skyfire technology works, what value it provides, and how it helps keep you secure in a rapidly changing industry.

What Skyfire offers

Skyfire claims to offer the world’s first payments network designed to support fully autonomous transactions involving AI agents, gigantic language models (LLMs), data platforms, and a variety of service providers.

This development is an vital step towards creating a recent global economy in which AI agents will be able to function as independent participants in the economy, able to make and receive payments without human intervention.

“We really see that for many of them this will be the next million users [vendor] “companies whose clients are AI agents,” Sarhangi said.

Today, AI agents and “agentic AI” are among the most talked-about topics in the rapidly evolving field of generative AI. Essentially, both concepts refer to the idea of ​​enabling programs powered by advanced AI models—LLMs, miniature language models (SMLs), and gigantic multimodal models (LMMs)—to perform actions on behalf of the user.

Instead of opening a spreadsheet and editing numbers or cropping a photo, an AI agent can do it for you—without you even uploading the necessary file—as long as it has permissions to your files and accounts.

But there’s a gigantic problem: If you want AI agents to do more advanced things—like aid with shopping, booking flights, or building recent apps, services, websites, and businesses—the chances are they’ll end up in a place where they need to pay for airline tickets, website hosting, or some other product or service and can’t. That’s where their usefulness ends for now.

“The problem is that AI agents don’t have identities, they don’t have bank accounts, and they can’t do these things because that identity and the ability to access finances is fundamentally impossible for them,” Sarhangi said. “So that’s what we’re unlocking.”

Skyfire has implemented a recent, secure payment system that will allow end users to transfer a specified amount of money to AI agents, which will then be spent on their behalf.

Think of giving your human assistant money to get you coffee or telling it to exploit its corporate card. That’s exactly what Skyfire is trying to do, but for non-human software.

Skyfire Highlights

The Skyfire platform is designed as an end-to-end financial stack for the AI ​​economy, providing the necessary tools and protocols for AI agents to operate autonomously. Key features include:

• Open, global payments protocol: It enables AI agents to access LLM, datasets, and API services without having to exploit customary payment methods such as subscriptions or credit cards. This open protocol enables global interoperability and seamless transactions.
• Automated budgets and control: Developers and their clients can set specific spending limits, ensuring AI agents operate within predefined business parameters. This feature supports both single transactions and ongoing campaigns.
• AgentID and History Verification: Skyfire provides open identifiers for AI agents, providing secure authentication and authorization. The system also stores transaction history, providing an additional layer of trust and verification for both agents and service providers.
• Verification service: The platform includes a verification service for developers and Agent companies, giving users visibility and control over network connections. This helps maintain a secure and trustworthy ecosystem for autonomous transactions.
• On-Ramps Financing: AI agents can be funded via customary banking methods or stablecoins, and all transactions will be instantaneous.

The company’s initial focus will be on reaching out to other AI solution providers and AI agent developers as a B2B software provider, enabling them to integrate the payments layer with their AI agents and products.

This way, if a developer wants to enable their customers and end users to load money into an AI agent, Skyfire can aid them do so — regardless of the underlying AI model.

“There are currently over 160 LLMs,” Sarhangi noted. “So we enable developers to use any of these 160 LLMs through our protocol, without having to go to each one, open a bank account, and maintain balances in any of them.”

Craig DeWitt, co-founder and chief product officer at Skyfire, emphasized the importance of enabling AI agents to operate autonomously in the economic sphere in a statement provided in a press release. “AI cannot truly change the world until it can freely transact. Agents need more than intelligence; they need autonomy to perform economic tasks without human intervention. That is the AI ​​economy,” DeWitt said.

The company will collect a commission on every transaction made through its platform and also offers value-added software as part of the payment, charging for software as a service (SaaS) on a subscription basis.

Skyfire delivers powerful security through simplicity and verification

The idea of ​​AI agents being able to move and spend real people’s money may seem unsettling and fraught with security risks to some readers, but the Skyfire co-founders believe they have set up their system in such a way that it is as secure as spending money directly online.

“All that’s required for registration today is that the user signs up with their email address, and we give them the space from that email address through this open protocol to fund accounts, set balances, and connect to our service providers through Skyfire,” DeWitt said. “It’s not like we’re getting people’s Social Security numbers.”

Instead, the user who creates a Skyfire account—usually a developer—will have the option to select other existing payment providers to connect to, including other major financial institutions and major credit cards. They or their end users can then exploit those existing major financial institution accounts, logins, and APIs to provision the Skyfire-powered AI agent with an amount of money selected by the end user.

Skyfire also allows developers and their end users to set difficult limits on how much cash an AI agent can spend. And as always, it’s up to the customer to decide how much cash to equip an agent with.

Additionally, Skyfire offers one of its value-added services, verification, for a subscription fee for users who want to ensure that agents are operating legitimately.

“We can verify that ‘this agent is owned by who it says it is, or this person operating the agent is who they say they are,’” DeWitt said. “There will be certain individuals and certain companies that will only transact with other participants if they go through the verification process. And so that’s kind of a step on top of this open network.”

Sturdy achievements

Skyfire’s management team has extensive experience in payments and technology.

Before becoming Skyfire’s co-founder and CEO, Sarhangi served as Vice President of Product at Ripple, where he focused on developing instant, universally accepted payment solutions.

Previously, he founded Jibe Mobile, which was acquired by Google in 2015.

DeWitt was also one of the original developers at Ripple, helping to develop the underlying payments technology that has become an integral part of the cryptocurrency and blockchain industries.

Previously he worked at Bloomberg, where he focused on financial products.

Both Sarhangi and DeWitt have experience building scalable, global software and payments infrastructure, allowing Skyfire to quickly establish itself as an industry leader.

The Skyfire Payment Network is now open to Agentic AI developers, LLMs, and API providers who can begin integrating the platform via the company’s website, skyfire.xyz.

With an groundbreaking approach to AI-powered trading and powerful investor support, Skyfire is poised to change the economic landscape for AI agents and the broader AI ecosystem.

Adjustment: This article originally incorrectly depicted Sarhangi’s role in Ripple. It has been updated and corrected. We apologize for the error.