From Shopify to Sapiom: Building the OS for Agentic Commerce

Sy Taylor  0:10  

Welcome to Tokenized, the show focused on stablecoins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real-world assets. And this show, well, it's a little bit more agentic commerce themed and all things agentic and AI. Of course, my name is Simon Taylor. I am your head of market dev at Tempo and author at FinTech Brain Food, and I'm joined by my Gen Z Commerce co-host Bamazi, CEO Mesh. How you doing, Bam?

Bam Azizi  0:34  

I'm doing great. Super excited for this episode.

Sy Taylor  0:36  

Joining us today is a phenomenal guest, Ilan Zabib, who is founder and CEO of Sapium. How are you doing,

Ilan Zerbib  0:44  

sir? Amazing. Thanks for having us today.

Sy Taylor  0:46  

I'm excited to learn more about what you do because it looks pretty cool. But before we do, I just got to remind viewers and listeners that views and opinions of contributors today are their own and might not reflect those of companies they represent. And please don't take anything we say as tax, legal, or financial advice. This is for informational purposes only, and of course, this episode is brought to you by Visa and our friends at Mesh. Elan, let's start with you before we get into Sapium, because you're doing some pretty cool things in AI. But how do you end up knowing what you do about payments and AI? What's the story there? What's the background?

Ilan Zerbib  1:21  

Yeah, so maybe I will start from France. So I'm a software engineer. Started building product when I was 12 or 13. I started my career in cybersecurity. So I worked a bit for the French Department of Defense, but quickly I moved into building startups. So I moved to the US in 2014. Built the first company called Ernie. So Ernie was a consumer advocate product. We're actually building autonomous agents that were getting refunds to people. So if you buy something and the price drop, Ernie was able to get you money back in the first three months. So it was actually millions and millions of bots that were scrapping the web, extracting data, and actually getting money back to 5 million users in US. So I faced actually what these agents are facing today, like 12 years ago, where the actually the internet infrastructure has been designed since they want to prevent automation, and actually today automation it's kind of something that we want to enable AI agents, but nothing works because from like the infrastructure, the DNS, the like the CDM, the fraud models, everything actually has been here to block those agents. And if you want to enable agents, you need to have a proper infrastructure for them. So I was running early for six years. We then got acquired in 2021, and after the acquisition, I spent five years at Shopify. So I was director of engineering, leading our global product called Shoppa, so I was building the Shoppe product, the identity layer, the trust layer, build a product called Shopcash. So I've been very deep into everything that is related to payments, identity, and trust, and same problems. Everything is designed actually to make sure that there's a human between every transaction, between every actions, and now we're in a world where actually we want to enable agents to access the economy to be impactful, and there is so many barriers that are blocking them to get to production and be economic actors. So that's kind of the history of Sapiom. Both internet infrastructure and financial infrastructure has been designed to block them. Sapiom is designed actually to enable them or to build the right infrastructure for those agents to thrive.

Sy Taylor  3:20  

Well, and and Shoppay's great heritage, Kaznetj and a good old friend, and I am such a fan of that product. And I think the thing it's done really well is kind of dramatically shrink the time it takes to check out with identity solving it. Really, it's an identity product masquerading as a as a payments product that sort of remembers you and remembers your shipping details, remembers your card details across multiple merchants around the internet, and so really curious as to what you saw in there that made you start to think about Sapium 12 months ago or so when you when you started that. Like what what is it at Shop Pay and and your career history that makes you think I need Sapium now? We need to go build this thing. Is it that sort of point you were making there about the like the whole internet is designed to block bots?

Ilan Zerbib  4:12  

Yeah, like the idea of Sapium actually came out like a bit more than two years ago, like actually in 2022 when we had ChatGPT that went live. It's the first time that actually people experience like AI. The first time that we actually cracked large language models, and actually that we could get value from AI. And for me, it was very obvious because those models were already very smart, but they were very smart in a chatbot. You can ask any question, they can give you any answer, but it's limited to a prompting on a chat interface, where the next step were quite clear. Actually, those models would become smarter. Meaning, it's not about just giving you an answer to a question. It's as well being able to reason. You give them a problem, and they would figure out how to solve it, and then being able to actually do things in the background. Because at the end, an agent. What we call an agent before, like the LLM before a chatbot, it's just a piece of software that is smart, and it doesn't have to live on in a chat interface. It can live in a background or scripts like any type of software, and then that's what we call agent. Really, those piece of software that can make autonomous decisions on their own. When I started to play with ChatGPT in 2022, that's where I realized actually that when that will be a thing, that those agents will be able to operate on their own, everything will break because the internet, MS infrastructure, everything has been designed to actually prevent those behaviors from the software. And then it took me a while to find the right moments to build. I think the it started to really take shape early last year when we started to see more reasoning models, chain of thoughts, and like really the early of cloud, and like early last year we had like a massive step change in in the reasoning models, and then in the first quarter we had MCP, which is like okay now you have very smart model and they can communicate with other systems, and then in May June we started to see payment trails emerging for agent, like X42 from Coinbase, and since then we had Mastercard that build agent pay, we are partner Stripe, they build machine payments protocol. So there's all the infrastructure pieces that are coming together to enable this new world of trillions of agents operating in the economy, and Sapium is the platform to enable that and make that a thing possible.

Bam Azizi  6:21  

Yeah. So, what is different between agent? Because my background is identity too. I want to know your take on agent identity or KYA and end user consumer identity or KYC. What does work and what doesn't work when you move from end user to agent as an end user,

Ilan Zerbib  6:43  

yeah, I think on the agent identity there is like three components. First, we have like who is the entity behind the agents? It might be a user, it might be a business, so the QYC or the QYB. So when we talk about know your agents, like agent identity, the agent identity needs to carry the consumer or the business identity, because when an agent make a purchase decision, he needs to prove actually with behind the agent, making sure that there is delegation of authority. Okay, as a business or as a consumer, I give authority to that agents to act on my behalf. And the third is actually what's the reputation of that agent. Like on the merchant side, can I trust these agents? Because I might trust the business or the customer behind, but or do I know that this agent actually is not an agent wrong, that he has a proper reputation? So there is three components: the QI, like the authorization on the carrying the business identity, is quite easy. You know, it's just we need to have a standard that carry those things. The agent reputation is much harder because you need new data that don't exist, actually almost like credit score data, and that's what we have at Sapiom because we enable agents to access the economy. We actually monitor and authorize every action. It might be an API call, it might be a transaction. Everything is actually monitored by Sapiom and authorized by your platform. As the agents operate, actually we build the credit score of the agent, which is kind of the missing piece to provide like the reputation of the agents, and those are amazing topics. I think it's still 12 months away before the agent identity is becoming something that is critical for the machine economy to thrive. We're not there now. The problem that is getting agents to production, but those are very interesting problems. For example, Octa. They invested to Sapiamon through Octa Ventures. Those are kind of topics that we're thinking as eventually we need a shared identity that is standard, that is recognized by everyone.

Sy Taylor  8:33  

Yeah. So you do have a very interesting cap table. You mentioned Octa there, but also like a real mixed bag. You've got Anthropic, but then also Dragonfly and Coinbase and Vanex. So there's like digital asset heritage. There's AI heritage. There's identity heritage. Why that cap table? Like, what is it that you're sort of thinking by having that group of people on you know backing you

Ilan Zerbib  8:59  

and Accel as well from the previous round with long-term infrastructure play, actually I curated the cap table. Like I'm curating a team how we build the best cap tables to win that that market, and we really can enable that trillion of agents to exist. It's very interesting because the way I see it, like saw Dragonfly, they led our Series A that we just announced two days ago. So we raised 45 billion Series A from Dragonfly, and when I had that discussion with Asi early on, like his thesis on the machine-to-machine economy is very similar to our thesis. So actually, we're a near infrastructure play. We're not a crypto play, but actually behind the scenes, those shoes are emerging because if you want agents to access the economy, most of those transactions are going to probably be powered by stablecoins, by microtransaction, by real-time settlement, and those are kind of the crypto rights that are enabling that. So there's two sides of the agent economy. There is the consumer side. An agent buying a flight ticket or a pair of shoes, which will most likely rely on existing rels. But if you want an agent that buy in real time an SMS, a search request, I don't know one second or one millisecond of a compute, those are only possible through stable coins like programmatic money that can settle in real time and that can have extremely low fees, and that's where actually those two hours are merging. It's actually to enable those trillion of agents. We need an extremely a solid crypto, like or blockchain ecosystem behind the scene that is powering that will eventually power agents.

Sy Taylor  10:34  

Utterly fascinating, Bam. You and I have spoken a lot about where's the logical entry point for stablecoins, and I think we've had a lot of stablecoin funds say, you know, oh well, obviously it's it's AI, but the AI folks have always been, I don't know, a little bit anti-crypto. How are you thinking about this one, and what's your reflection?

Bam Azizi  10:54  

Yeah, my reflection is to Elon's point: we'll have a lot of mission-to-measure payments that you can hate it, you can love it. What whatever your feeling is, you need to put it aside because the traditional financial tools and means will break in that new ecosystem, or that new framework, or the new modern agentic world. Right. So, if an agent wants to pay 0.0005 cents, you cannot wire, you cannot use Visa card or Mastercard. You have to use a stablecoin. If you want to have a global coverage, you have to use a stablecoin. If you want to have a true authorization and add rules and limitations and regulations around what agent can do, what cannot, you need to use a smart contract and blockchain. If you want to do it in a truly global sense, there is no other choice. It's not like I have multiple choice. I just go with what I love. Like no matter if you love it or hate it, that's the only choice you have to use it. I think a lot of anti-crypto type of comments you're hearing from the AI world is mostly around crypto as as an asset, not blockchain or stablecoin as a technology. So I think a lot of thought leaders in in agentic commerce and especially in AI, they're actually pro crypto and pro stablecoin. Look at like for instance Sam Altman. They have another company called Ward or the the Ward app. Probably everyone knows. Tools for humanity says everything is built on top of blockchain, and they're like also thinking about like moving identity on blockchain as well. So I don't think anyone hates blockchain itself. I think it's just more of a crypto NFT like Bitcoin versus like AI. Which one is cooler and hotter?

Sy Taylor  12:40  

Yeah, and we can certainly argue that the Bitcoin folks helped build out a lot of neo clouds that have become very, very useful for inference compute at this point with with power. But I'm interested in Lan, you were sort of talking about there's a future state of identity, but right now you're sort of my understanding is you're sort of helping people root models really effectively and efficiently. You've got an agent studio and an agent runtime. I look at the difference between the companies that are shipping faster and getting the AI dividend, and everybody else as being the people who like the the two or five companies that have managed to build this all in house. You know, you ramp, Block, Robinhood, but is Sapium kind of this for everybody else. You're the platform to build agents, but also this smart model routing is a really interesting idea, which is like, hey, maybe I don't want to go all in on Anthropic or OpenAI or pay their fees. I want the task to go to the right model at the right time. So, how does all of that work inside the Sapien platform?

Ilan Zerbib  13:41  

Yeah, it's a great question. So yeah, we have like what we announced two days ago. It's really three new products that we brought to the market. Really, the agent studio, which is getting from an idea to a production ready agent in like minutes. So we have our own opinionative frameworks on how agents should be designed and how they should be shipped. So we are actually helping builders thinking about agentic product and helping them build the right way agents. Then we have the agent runtime, which is really the deployment environment, the production environment for agents to run. It's kind of their world. We provide the file system, the sandbox, secrets management. So everything is is related to the tenant, to the agent. So when an agent runs, they can have their own environment, which provide infinite scale, and as part of the environment, we actually give access to the agents to the economy. So that's the first product we build, which is the governance, and then the access layer, really giving agent a ledger to buy any type of API services. This is backed into our runtime. So an agent screening on Sapium, actually they they can have access to any type of capabilities in a way that is fully methoded and governed, and then on top of that, that's the what we call the Sappium router, which really for every agent action, every agent steps, we decide what's the best services and what's the best model. So we optimize based on cost, latency, quality of the output. So we are constantly optimizing the path of like the agents to make sure that they. Don't always get the most out of reactions.

Sy Taylor  15:02  

I love that ledger piece because you sort of think about auditability, but also a baseline of knowing what these things are doing, and then their ability to move money, their ability to pay for things like that as a foundation really sets you up for for a future. And so many companies are trying to do this at the moment. The other thing I saw, you're running your own inference stack on dedicated GPUs. Why?

Bam Azizi  15:27  

Why?

Ilan Zerbib  15:30  

I believe inference is key. Like, if you need an agent, actually, the way we see it is like the intelligence is just a capability, like any other one. Like an agent running an SMS or needed to run a prompt, it needs to get access to a capability. So we integrate that into the platform, the capability as well. Like the inference, it's kind of paper use. So every prompt is methoded and authorized actually by the platform, and it's coming actually from the balance of the agents. And why? It's because like we need to optimize the cost of intelligence. We've seen with some of our customers that we're innovating, really building like consumers or B 2b product. Where if you default to the frontier models for everything, you can't run a business. Actually, you have you go you go more crop as you have negative ROI. Yeah, it's it's negative margin by hundreds of percent, and we've seen that with one of our customers that was mass market consumer product, automating like businesses for people to really build businesses, but the cost of inference grew from like zero to like 1.2 million after three months of operation. They were getting users, but they were not at million user scale. They were at like 1000s of user scale, and just the cost of intelligence when you give autonomy is just too high because it's very different to a product where you prompt because when you prompt you have a human that decide every actions when you have an autonomy it's an agent that works whenever like 24/7 that consumes intelligence and that intelligence is actually not scalable so today there is a massive barrier to innovation which is actually the cost of shipping those agents. When you're an individual running European clore, you manage your spend, and it's fine. But actually, if it's a product you're trying to sell to 1000s of customers, you have to control the influence cost because if not, you can't even build your product and ship it to your customers. So that's what we've seen. And then we say actually, like the intelligence should be part of the platform. Today we are pushing to every customer's consumer B2B like model selection. Even if you go to the mainstream consumer app builders, they ask you to pick your model. No one knows what's the best model, so everyone defaults to the most expensive one. Where actually for 95% of the use cases now is the new OpenWebs model we've seen over the last three months. Actually, OpenWeb's model can get you the cost of the intelligence to pennies versus them dollars, delivering the same output, and that's what we provide. So the fact that we internalize the inference stack, it's because we're able to ensure we deliver the same quality of an output for a frontier model, leveraging open weights model, meaning we are able to optimize the cost of the inference by 60 to 90% providing the same quality of what the agent is trying to achieve, because we automate, we do the routing, and we have all the data to understand actually what the agent is trying to achieve.

Sy Taylor  18:15  

And I imagine as well, this sort of means that the experience for somebody coming to your platform is a little bit simpler, and that they're not having to sign a contract with OpenRooter behind the scenes, or b a bunch of enterprise agreements with all of the labs in order to have that inference time compute or the the models served to them. You're just your full stack. You they they sign a deal with you. The agent runs inside the runtime, and you take care of everything else below it. Yeah, so fascinating.

Ilan Zerbib  18:45  

Yeah, and we really believe that to prove that we believe we are the best at optimizing the the model is actually we don't even charge for the model. When you run an agent on SAPM, we charge you a flat fee per agent execution, and that includes the infrastructure, all the capabilities that your agent need, and the intelligence, because we know that we are actually able to optimize your intelligence to get you the best agent with the best outcome. But every steps along the way are optimized by our router.

Bam Azizi  19:12  

So if the unit economics goes down, or the unit economics makes sense for you, does it does it make sense for you to move away from owning your own GPUs and your own stack, or working with others.

Ilan Zerbib  19:24  

We decided to operate our own GPUs to first have dedicated capacity because early on we tried actually to use serverless open weights models. There's two problems there. On one end, you have like most of the open weights models are not served in U.S. or Europe, so you are actually sending the data to third-party countries that most of the users don't want to send their data. And on the other hand, for the only few that are U.S.-based or Euro-based, there are such a timing capacity where actually you are always facing you have zero resiliency in. Inference and most of the time they will not be able to sell your inference because there is massive demand and they don't allocate enough GPUs to those models because usually they will rather sell here contract GPUs to companies trying to do fine tuning or RL or model training. So we decided to okay we need to provide that capability which is core for customers to succeed. We need to make sure that our customers have a margin that is good enough for them to even be able to scale, because it doesn't make sense to have customers, and then after three months they go bankrupt because they pay frontier models. So we decided to internalize that and really add the customer succeeder.

Sy Taylor  20:37  

That's so fascinating. You don't see you don't get a lot of startups coming out the gate at the moment, building sort of model routing and kind of an agent building stack that also has gone all the way vertically integrated. And you know, Elon's getting applauded for having built giant stacks and data centers, but actually the pragmatism of what you're doing here with like owning a stack for agent workflows at an ultra low cost is is just like diametrically opposed to that sort of scale and and really pragmatic, which is which is kind of refreshing in a lot of ways. But talk to me about what people are using Sapien for today. Like the 270 million transactions, 100,000 daily agent runs. What what are all those agents doing?

Ilan Zerbib  21:22  

Yeah, so we have seen the long tails of agents. There is the obvious one, like a lot of coding agents, really building products and shipping products. We have a lot of like go-to-market marketing agents, like agents being able to find leads on sales on like customers to businesses or like those agents. We even have agents that run end-to-end ads for customers, Instagram and Facebook, and all those ads are fully automated by some of the agents running our platform, which is fascinating. So customers are giving a budget, and then the agent just figure out the context of the company, build an asset, a video with models, and then is able to buy actually ads on ads platforms, and then close the loop on performance. So it's really the long tail. We have a lot of agents with customer support, chat. We are really the platform that enables builders to build and innovate and scale. So we are seeing like any type of agents getting to production on our platform.

Sy Taylor  22:18  

There's so much more to ask. I'm just going to take a quick pause here while we hear from our sponsors, and we'll be right back. Stablecoin operations usually mean a wallet from one vendor and on-ramp from another, and then controls stitched together across all of them. Visa's stablecoin platform fixes this fundamentally. You can mint, move, and manage stablecoins across OpenUSD, and you remain your own custodian all in one single environment. Then, stablecoin-linked cards let you spend balances anywhere Visa is accepted. That's Visa, the global leader in payments, and of course, sponsor of this show. You can find out more at visa.com forward slash crypto. This episode is brought to you by Mesh, the global crypto payments network. Mesh makes it possible for anyone or any agent to get paid or pay instantly from any wallet on any chain anywhere in the world. You can learn more at meshpay.com. I thank you to our sponsors. So we alluded a little bit earlier on to stablecoins and agentic commerce, and and today, like the volume's super small and super early. But you know, you've talked about identity. You talked about a 12-month time horizon. When does agentic commerce start to get real in your mind, Ilan?

Ilan Zerbib  23:47  

I don't think we're that far because, as you shared, like the numbers, we're already seeing like meaningful volume. I still think it's very tiny. Like the main barriers people are facing today, it's cost and even getting agents to production. So those are the things that we are solving, and that's why we are here to enable the next trillion agents because we believe we give an advantage for builders that build on our platform by abstracting all the things that are needed to actually build the product. But that economy is going to be massive, like we are talking about trillions of dollars in the machine economy in the next three to five years, and we are like a fraction of that. So, but when I think we are like six to 12 months away from that market to really explode.

Bam Azizi  24:28  

So you know, like Simon is the bad cop. I'm the good cop. Is more realist. I'm more optimist. So and we have a $1 bet that what's going to happen in next 12 months. So what is the holdup for like big companies, let's say Entropic that is on your cap table or OpenAI or others, to enable their agents to pay with just credit card? And what is the holdup there? Why it's not happening?

Ilan Zerbib  24:56  

There is no holdup actually. The technologies are there eventually. Shopify, they partner with OpenAI to deploy like shopping to OpenAI, so agents can actually transact. There is protocols like UCP from Google. There is many protocols that are enabling that. The holdup is actually the consumers, people. They don't really want to delegate purchase decision for most of the things, and you know there were a lot of learnings from like the ecosystem on the market on that. When ChatGPT was able to buy things on behalf of consumers, actually they pull back a lot on that direction. I think it's a matter of consumers not willing to give away because actually shopping is fun. People wants to decide their hotel. They want to decide the color of their pair of shoes, like so. All those things are kind of very a taste that are personal. So I think that's one of the blocker in terms of technology. Like the credit card infrastructure is good now. Like there is protocols that are designed actually to enable those kind of consumer purchases. That's not really the area that we are focused on. We are really focused on like the machine economy, the APIs, agents buying compute, inference, or API services, and this is like already there. We're already seeing that agents operating openly is really starting, and I think the opportunity on that machine economy is so much bigger than on the consumer economy, because on the consumer economy it's a market that is existent. People are not going to get more money because agents are being on their behalf. However, if you think about the next trillion agents that needs to use compute and communicate with the rest of the world, this is a massive economy that is starting from zero.

Bam Azizi  26:32  

Makes sense. So you're more bullish on agent tech, agent to agent transaction or machine to agent transaction than human to machine.

Sy Taylor  26:40  

Yeah, humans do like shopping. There's some good. Your Alamata Shopify has put out some really good data that for long tail merchants, their like funnel has really changed with AI. People arrive later in the funnel; they're four to six times more likely to convert because they've done all their discovery already inside the LLM, and they just show up ready to buy. But Walmart, when they used sort of tried to make checkout work inside of ChatGPT with either Spark or ChatGPT's old conversion, conversion got worse than on the .com. And so, I mean, merchants are going to make the obvious choice there. Where's the conversion better on my .com or this other place? And on this other place, I'm giving up some margin to acquire the customer, and the conversions worse. It's just it's just a bad deal for the merchants as well. So until that changes, which it might, I wonder if we're in sort of this like WAP phones era of consumer agentic commerce, where you know the experience just isn't there yet. So, but but I'm interested. Just a couple of days ago, as we record this, we saw Cloudflare launch their wallets for agents. So, what do you think about companies like that and incumbents from the big tech side, the CDNs, you know, the monetization gateway? How's all that going to play into this?

Ilan Zerbib  28:02  

Yeah, that's that's interesting. Cloudflare definitely in an interesting position as really being the gate of internet. So they have a power that not a lot of companies have in this ecosystem. So that's why they built their own stablecoins a few months ago, and now they're investing into wallet infrastructure. For us, we're actually working with all those partners because those partners are actually great for the ecosystem. If it's Cloudflare or Stripe or any one of those companies, they're actually enabling merchants to sell to agents, which is what's lacking today. There's not a lot of merchants that are enabled to be able to sell to agents. On our end, we're the platform where the agents run, and we actually want our agents to have access to millions of services, so we actually want some of those players to actually have a big role and enable those merchants. I think it's going to be extremely competitive on the merchant side because everyone is trying to ship their own protocols, their own wallet, and everyone is trying to take a cut on the transaction coming from agents. But we'll see where it ends. Yeah,

Sy Taylor  29:00  

we shall. We shall indeed. You're trying to remove anything standing between builders and the next trillion agents. Like, what has to be true for those trillion agents to exist? Because I get called in by boards of large organizations all the time, and you know they're still trying to figure out how to be better than just using Copilot, like is it an education gap? Is it arming the builders themselves? Like what's the gap here?

Ilan Zerbib  29:28  

Education on what's possible with agents, but I think infrastructure. That's why actually we exist. It's today if you want to build an agentic product in production or even internal for to your team in a way that it's safe, that just works and that's cost effective. It's extremely hard because you have to stitch together a lot of infrastructure pieces that were not designed for agents. So, or you have to build all the stack yourselves, or you have to rely on product like Sapiom. But all that ecosystem, I think, is just new. We've been talking about agents for like two years, but actually the. Day one of agents, I would say, was kind of open close when everyone realized that actually, okay, we are there and agents can do things, and that was just four months ago. So I think there is just a matter of timing, where in six months we'll have very different conversations. Agents will be deployed at scale, not too much larger scale. Enterprise would actually start to deploy those agents. But actually, what's needed for enterprise is first making sure that the cost of insurance to build agent is not as high as it is today, that you can control the spend, and that's what Asif shared with us. It's actually today like the CEOs are becoming CFOs of companies because the cost of inference is extremely high, and like the cost for a company is massive. And the third is the governance audit trails, making sure that every agent action is approved, making sure that it stays within the boundaries of what the company authorizes. So there is a lot of barriers that we are removing over time, and that's why I think we're still a few months away from massive adoption.

Bam Azizi  30:55  

On the Cloudflare side, so historically they were like famous for blocking bots, and so there is a lot of capture to capture basically bots and typically bad bots. I think it is changing to prove that you are a bot, so I give you a different type of access, right? And the way that like we were transacting like humans were transacting. Would just go and fill in a form, put your shipping information, and you build it as Shop Pay, right? So that is very different for for agents. And how do you see that the agentic commerce would change the interface of how you're browsing the internet? For instance, you mentioned that people don't want to give away their purchase capability, so they they wouldn't authorize their their agents just go shop on their behalf. But what if your agent learns from you, and every time it comes back with top three options, those are the exact top three options that you pick. At some point, you would give away the last mile delivery or the last part of the purchase transaction to your agent, right? How does that change the interface of the internet as we know today?

Ilan Zerbib  32:12  

Yeah, I think for the last mile, there are more than just the item selection, like what we've seen from my previous experiences. People they want to understand the shipping windows. What are the different shipping options? They want to understand what are the taxes. What are the different upsell? Because if you go to the website, you get actually discounts. Unlike you have a bunch of upsell. There is an experience that is built on checkout that is not present when you let your agent buy. That people really care about. But oh, does it show on internet? To be honest, I'm not really bullish on. I know there's a lot of investment on a lot of company building like browser use and like you know agents browsing the web to do things. I think there is a massive market in the short to mid term. I think if you think long term, I don't see why an agent needs to access an interface that has been designed for human to be able to do an action that is provided by a machine, like that are already communicating with API through some interface. So over time, I think the interface to agent would disappear, and it would just be machine-to-machine APIs because those APIs are here on both end. It just are not exposed. So this works for like every service to expose the APIs for the agents and gate them with a payments protocol. If it's paid resources, it will take time to adopt. So that's why there is a lot of need today for agents browsing the web. I think that's very short to mid term. If we think about long term, like there's a reason for an agent to go to a website. Makes sense.

Sy Taylor  33:35  

So fascinating. I almost think about Stripe Atlas and Stripe Connect together, but for agents, you know, like it's it's the place that you form the new agent identity, and then it's alive. But now it needs to do things, so you need this entire dashboard and this entire set of capabilities, and the ability to build checkouts and carts and optimize like what it's doing and audit it and make sure it's performing, and make sure things deal with edge cases like returns and refunds. It's like all of that hidden pain that, unless you've built in e-commerce before, you don't know exists. Also exists for agents too. So I'm interested in sort of what what the the focus is now. You've got your Series A. You know, you've obviously had some transactions on the platform, but who's your ideal client here? Is it the builders of agents? Is it the people building the vertical AI agent stacks and them selling out to enterprise? Is it the enterprises themselves? Like, where are you? Where are you aiming here?

Ilan Zerbib  34:36  

Yeah. So the opportunity actually is developer first. Like, we want to enable the builders really building autonomous products because they're the most advanced in their use cases. Because they're starting from zero, they have no legacy, they can move extremely fast, and we're actually enabling them to move much faster. And those companies are going extremely fast as well because they're quickly replacing incumbents with products that are fully autonomous. So on one hand, we are. Like the developers, really the builders, but on the other end, we have a lot of value to create and to provide to enterprises as well. So we have two motions. We already have an enterprise support motion where we deploy engineers inside enterprises to help them adopt AI and deploy agents using SAPM. But we are as well extremely focused on the developer community. We have a very generous criteria to actually help builders, builders like really build and ship agents to production. And in order to enable the trivial agents, you need actually to power both end of the ecosystem. And that's what we do, and that's why we arise this this series.

Sy Taylor  35:34  

Hello, this has been an education. What didn't I ask you that I should have asked you? What's the best question you've had recently?

Ilan Zerbib  35:40  

It's a good one, an interesting one that is not related to payments. But how do we build a company in this new AI world, which is a top of my tranny? And I'm always even brainstorming with my cloud code and my ChatGPT on what's the best way to run an AI-native company that is enabling trillions of agents as a CEO. And it's a white topic. It's not easy because I want the company to be automated as much as possible, and really having people to have ownership and run armies of agents. So we still have a big team, and I still believe we need a very big team to succeed and to really capture the market because there's so much things to do. But the way I design the organization is very different than when I was running my previous company, like a few years back, it's less about teams of people working on one product on one problem, and the way we design Sapiom, it's every engineer, every team member is owner of a key metric of a key component of the product, and then they figure out with AI how to make the right trade-off or to figure the unknowns, and actually we scale team horizontally rather than vertically. So I still need a lot of people because I have hundreds of business metrics I want to drive on things I want to improve on. But it's less about a team of 10 working on one thing on like each individual is a learner.

Sy Taylor  36:56  

Yeah, I did a report called the Enterprise AI Playbook from studying ramp and block and anthropic and and kind of just the the cadences inside the company the the rituals that you would have seen in 2020 and what the weekly workflows look like and the job titles have just completely shifted over the last 18 months and in the last six months especially if you peer inside these organizations what the agentic tooling has done to the day job is is dramatic. So I can only imagine how top of mind that is for you. Well, we'll have to get you back and talk about that specifically at some point and and see how it's doing. But that's all the questions I had for now. I want to thank you so much, Ilan. If people want to learn more about Sapium and get their hands on it, give it a try, or they want to speak to you. How do they get hold of you? How do they get hold of Sapium? I'm

Ilan Zerbib  37:47  

on X on the LinkedIn and as well Sapium AI. You can sign up. We give 50 free agents run a day. We give as well $15 credits for like builders to really experience the product on cheap agents, and we love feedback. Like there's still a lot of things to many barriers to remove. So any barriers that builders are facing, we want to know them. Work on them.

Sy Taylor  38:09  

Excellent, Bam. If people want to find out more about Mesh,

Bam Azizi  38:12  

Bam is easy Mesh on X or LinkedIn or Mesh Pay on X or LinkedIn.

Sy Taylor  38:17  

You'll find me at Sy Taylor on all of the socials and at Tempo XYZ, where we're trying to make machine payments an everyday thing, and you'll also find a lot more of this show if you go ahead and subscribe. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on YouTube. And if you leave us a review or a comment, that really helps others find the show. So do engage, and I think conversations like this make that more than worthwhile. Thank you very much, and we'll catch you next time.