Agentic shopping and autonomous payments dominate discussions of how artificial intelligence will transform online commerce. 

Less discussed is the underlying infrastructure of how these agentic bots will tool around the internet and execute transactions in the kind of friction-free way so many digital players expect to see.

Circuit & Chisel, a New York-based software startup, is working on this problem. The company raised $19.2 million in September to launch ATXP, an agent transaction protocol, to help AI agents navigate and make payments, connecting AI and commerce with fewer glitches.

The company was co-founded by two former Stripe executives. CEO Louis Amira was formerly head of crypto and AI partnerships at the larger payments company, and David Noel-Romas, who was Stripe’s head of crypto engineering, is Circuit & Chisel’s chief technology officer. They left Stripe last year.

Stripe is among the company’s investors, as is Polygon Labs, the blockchain infrastructure company, and Samsung Next, Samsung Electronics’ investment group.

“We believe payments are one of the most valuable layers in technology,” Samsung Next said in a September blog post about its investment. “Circuit & Chisel has the team, product, and timing to make ATXP the default rails for autonomous software.”

Amira, who is based in the New York metro area, discussed the company in a Feb. 23 interview.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

PAYMENTS DIVE: Why did you need to leave Stripe to start this business?

LOUIS AMIRA: We left on very, very good terms. We started the (Stripe) crypto team. Once upon a time, there were some moments where people within the company asked, should we still be doing crypto after (cryptocurrency exchange) FTX blew up and all that, and the founders had amazing conviction, and we stayed around. And then when [Stripe] bought Bridge, and were buying some other companies, a handful of investors were sort of like, ‘You know, what other crazy ideas do you have that are a few years out?’ It was like, ‘We have some pretty crazy ideas.’ We built for a long time, launched it, and there was still nobody out [there] to use it. I think Stripe would have been underwriting a future vision that could have worked, but it was probably a little too far away. Once they saw what we were up to and what we built, they were like, ‘Yes, this is a thing that we want to invest in and have a hand in.’

What’s the likely path for Circuit & Chisel as the agentic ecosystem evolves?

I thought I had a pretty good handle as to what the future looked like several years out when we left [Stripe], a little over 12 months ago. I have become less certain … I would say that from everybody that we’ve talked to – you can assume that we’ve talked with the other roughly ten companies in the space that are somewhat similarly situated, and all of the strategics, Coinbase and investors, Solana, Stripe, a bunch of others – nobody’s really willing to place massive bets on any of this stuff at this point, because it’s just so unclear. 

How does this play out, given all the agentic protocols in the market, and the jockeying by so many companies in this space?

We have pretty strong conviction on what we need to do the next many months. And what might sound crazy, but I think you’re going to hear a lot more is, most of the humans have been signing up through our stuff, but we’re starting to see agents sign up and effectively install ATXP for themselves so that they can use all of our tools and services. Agents are very likely our target customer moving forward, which is a thing that got me laughed out of some rooms a year ago, and now sounds way more plausible for a lot more people.

At some future point, will we direct our agents in terms of shopping, bill payments and other tasks? Or is the end state one where humans stay out of this process?

I suspect your agent does more and more every year that passes without you having to weigh in. It’s like, ‘OK, that’s the same bill I’ve had the last [few] months. I don’t need to look at it and archive and do other stuff like that.’ I suspect you end up interacting with really one specific agent, maybe like a work and a personal or a couple others. But I generally think it’s just one, and I suspect that kicks off a bunch of either sub-agents or one-off things, but you will think about it as, not to anthropomorphize it to a child, but like, ‘OK, here’s your allowance,’ or ‘Here’s the amount that you’re OK spending – you can go spend $100 and $200 and $400, whatever.’ I have a hard time envisioning that, way out in the future, you’re going to be making most of the decisions you’re making [today]. You’re interacting with that thing on a higher and higher level, bigger-picture sorts of things.