firmly raises $15 million and launches Ask Agent to help merchants adopt agentic commerce. JP Morgan, Mastercard and Samsung among investors.
Firmly, the “no-code” agentic commerce platform connecting merchants to high-intent digital channels, today announced a $15 million Series A funding round led by Squarepoint Capital, with participation from strategic investors including J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard and Samsung NEXT. “The company also launched Ask Agent, an end-to-end conversational shopping experience for merchant websites that includes AI-powered natural language product discovery with a real-time catalog, in-chat checkout and traditional customer support functionality.” – according to the press release.
AI is creating new ways for consumers to discover and buy products. Adobe expects AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites to grow 130% year over year this holiday season. Yet participating in agentic shopping requires merchants to connect product catalogs, inventory, payments and checkout infrastructure across a growing number of AI platforms and protocols.
“firmly addresses that complexity with a common infrastructure layer enabled by its firmly Connect platform, which creates a single no-code connection that allows merchants to sell through new channels and maintain control of customer relationships, transaction data and their role as merchant of record. The capital will accelerate the growth of firmly Connect globally with merchants and across AI agents, marketplaces, social networks, shoppable advertising platforms and other commerce destinations. Today, firmly Connect can help AI assistants, publishers, social media platforms and other commerce channels access more than 11 million merchants representing more than $900 billion in GMV.” – the company said.
“AI is quickly creating new storefronts for commerce, but merchants cannot build a new integration every time one emerges,” said Kumar Senthil, co-founder and CEO of firmly. “Our north star has always been to enable the merchants to sell in any channel with ZERO engineering effort. Unlike other players in this space who expect the merchant to integrate with them, firmly Connect integrates with the merchants and gives them complete control to sell wherever their customers choose to shop. This funding allows us to bring more merchants and more destinations onto that infrastructure much faster.”
“Whether a shopping experience is human-led or agent-led, merchants need one reliable connection to all of it. Today’s protocol standards are fragmented and can be slow to implement for merchants — firmly delivers the infrastructure layer that bridges the gap, combining the flexibility of browser automation use by Muse or Instinct with the security, Trust and efficiency of deterministic protocols like UCP, all without a single line of merchant code.” said Damien Balsan, co-founder and President of firmly.
Bringing agentic shopping directly to the merchant and beyond
As part of that expansion, firmly is launching Ask Agent, a conversational shopping experience designed to give merchants an immediate way to add agentic commerce to their own websites. Ask Agent allows consumers to describe what they are looking for in natural language and receive product recommendations based on the merchant’s real-time catalog, pricing and inventory. Consumers can move from discovery through checkout within the conversation, with support for loyalty, cross-sell and post-purchase customer service. The experience works with the merchants existing commerce infrastructure and can be added to a merchant website with a single line of JavaScript and without massive expense or resources.
Early merchant deployments are demonstrating the measurable impact of firmly’s unified Ask Agent shopping experience, driving conversion rate improvements of up to 18% and increases in average order value (AOV) of up to 23%.
The round also includes Alumni Ventures, ARK Invest, Benhamou Global Ventures, Granada Funds, Hike Ventures, The Mercantile Companies, and Versus Ventures, bringing firmly’s total funding to approximately $20 million.
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firmly.ai is the agentic commerce platform that makes it easy for merchants and new AI shopping channels to create native shopping experiences that make it easier for users to shop and checkout regardless of surface. Firmly creates a direct and “real-time” connection that simply allows a merchant to expand their catalog, product pages and checkout into new channels without deploying any engineering resources. Merchants stay merchants of record on every order, with their payment provider, customer relationships, and data unchanged, while destinations integrate firmly to reach every merchant through one standardized connection. firmly is founded and run by repeat commerce tech entrepreneurs and headquartered in Seattle, WA.
