Mastercard's Start Path has admitted 22 companies to its first Agentic Commerce & Services cohort.
The cohort, announced in September 2026, forms the inaugural intake of the Agentic Commerce & Services track within Start Path, Mastercard's startup engagement programme. Since its founding in 2014, Start Path has worked with more than 500 companies across more than 60 countries, and the new track was established in January 2026 to focus specifically on startups building agent platforms, agent-native tools, and emerging agentic payment flows.
The 22 companies admitted to the programme span a range of functions across the agentic commerce stack. Several focus on connecting agents to payment and financial infrastructure: Merge helps fintechs and financial institutions connect their products to business systems, agent tools, and AI models, while Skyfire provides agents with verified identity and payment credentials for use across the open internet. SolvaPay enables businesses to sell to and be paid by AI agents and the people using them, and Crossmint supports fintechs launching stablecoin products, including wallets, on- and off-ramps, and embedded infrastructure.
A further group addresses risk, verification, and fraud prevention in agent-driven transactions. Tunic Pay helps banks identify scams in agentic payments by assessing the broader context of a transaction, and t54 supports merchants and payment networks in verifying identity and assessing risk when transacting with agents. PayOS describes itself as a payment intelligence layer that provides information on every entity involved in a payment, including cards, accounts, businesses, people, transactions, and agents, before funds move. In addition, Simetrik offers financial control infrastructure intended to provide transaction-level, audit-grade verification throughout the payment flow.
Other participants focus on commerce enablement and merchant readiness. Wizard is a shopping agent designed to guide consumers from search through checkout with recommendations drawn from across the web. Firmly enables merchants to sell through AI agents and digital channels without additional engineering work, converting product discovery into checkout. ReFiBuy helps brands and retailers optimise product catalogues for discovery and purchase by AI shopping agents, and Nevermined provides a commerce logic layer that lets merchants verify, accept, and settle agent-driven purchases on existing payment rails.
Enterprise infrastructure and vertical applications
The cohort also includes companies addressing enterprise deployment of agentic systems. Grovity assists merchants in aligning systems and operations to function with autonomous digital workforces, while 10Clouds helps enterprises deploy AI agents to automate business processes. Sapiom provides infrastructure on which vertical AI companies can run their agents, and Satsuma helps merchants launch and track large language model connectors without maintaining multiple bespoke integrations. At the same time, Glassbox Labs builds AI solutions intended to support auditable workflows and payment experiences in production environments.
According to the announcement, sector-specific applications are also represented. Masraff combines expense, travel, and corporate card management with automated fraud prevention, while MediConCen applies agentic AI and blockchain to insurance claims processing. Luca AI offers small businesses a conversational interface unifying sales, marketing, finance, and operations, with access to dynamically priced capital, and Thyris.AI develops agentic commerce and AI products spanning infrastructure, financial services, and product discovery. Testudo provides AI liability insurance for US companies managing legal and financial risk from generative AI deployment.
Industry context
The programme's expansion reflects wider positioning by card networks around agentic commerce, a model in which AI agents can complete transactions on behalf of users rather than only recommending products. Mastercard has also introduced Mastercard Agent Pay and joined Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, alongside work with Microsoft to bring Agent Pay to Copilot Checkout. The Start Path Agentic Commerce & Services track sits alongside other Start Path programmes covering acceptance, blockchain and digital assets, emerging fintech, open finance, small business, and security solutions.
For the companies involved, participation offers access to Mastercard's network of partners and customers, along with opportunities to collaborate on products tailored to agentic environments. The breadth of the cohort, spanning identity verification, fraud prevention, catalogue optimisation, stablecoin infrastructure, and vertical-specific tools, indicates the range of technical and commercial problems that companies are addressing as agentic transactions move toward wider adoption across payments and commerce.
