Dive Brief:

• PayPal Holdings acquired Tel Aviv-based company Cymbio, which provides multi-channel orchestration services in e-commerce and agentic commerce environments, according to a Thursday press release.
• "Acquiring Cymbio's technology and team will enhance our agentic commerce capabilities and accelerate the expansion to more of our merchants,” Michelle Gill, PayPal’s executive vice president and general manager of small business and financial services, said in the release.
• The deal is expected to close in the first half of this year. The company didn’t immediately respond to a question about the price paid and said in the release that it wasn’t disclosing financial terms of the acquisition.

Dive Insight:

San Jose, California-based PayPal has made a big push over the past year to delve into the AI-driven agentic commerce sphere, which promises to let consumers designate automated bots to do their shopping and eventually make payments too. The technology is still evolving, but in the meantime PayPal and other companies are racing to be involved in the new marketplace.

The digital payments pioneer partnered with Cymbio in October to make AI-powered agentic shopping services available to its merchant clients, so they in turn could draw consumers into that new commerce ecosystem. At that time, PayPal touted that tie and others as part of its effort to make a “first wave” of agentic tools related to buyer protection and identity verification available.

Cymbio, founded in 2015, is providing support for PayPal’s Store Sync service, which lets merchants make their product line-up available within AI channels, the release said. It also allows merchants to shift orders from customers to their fulfillment systems.

PayPal also locked arms with the card network Mastercard in October to advance agentic shopping options by integrating the former’s digital wallet with the latter’s cards.

PayPal already has made some agentic commerce services, as well as checkout options, available on AI systems, including Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity. It has plans to do so also with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini app and AI Mode “soon,” according to the Thursday release.