People with no coding background are discovering that they can create their own custom apps using Vibe Coding – solutions like Lovable that turn plain language descriptions into working code.
While these prompt-to-code tools can help create good prototypes, launching them into full-scale production (as this reporter recently discovered) can be difficult without figuring out how to connect the application to external technology services, such as sending text messages via SMS, email, and processing Stripe payments.
Ilan Zerbib, who spent five years as Shopify’s director of engineering for payments, is building a solution that can eliminate these back-end infrastructure headaches for non-technical creators.
Last summer, Zerbib launched Sapiom, a San Francisco startup developing a financial layer that allows AI agents to securely purchase and access software, APIs, data and computations — essentially creating a payment system that lets AI automatically purchase the services it needs.
Whenever an AI agent connects to an external tool like Twilio for SMS, it requires authentication and micro-payments. Sapiom aims to make this entire process seamless, allowing AI agents to decide what to buy and when to buy without human intervention.
“In the future, apps are going to consume services that require payment. At the moment, there’s really no easy way for agents to reach them all,” said Amit Kumar, a partner at Accel.
Kumar has met with dozens of startups in the AI payments space, but he believes Zerbib’s focus on the financial level of enterprises, rather than consumers, is what’s really needed to make AI agents work. That’s why Accel is leading Sapiom’s $15 million seed round, with participation from Okta Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Array Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, and Coinbase Ventures.
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“If you really think about it, every API call is a payment. Every time you send a text message, it’s a payment. Every time you open a server for AWS, it’s a payment,” Kumar told TechCrunch.
While it’s still early days for Sapiom, the startup hopes its infrastructure solution will be adopted by vibe-coding companies and other companies building AI agents that will eventually be tasked with performing many tasks on their own.
For example, anyone who vibe-codes an app with SMS capabilities won’t need to manually sign up for Twilio, add a credit card, and copy the API key into their code. Instead, Sapiom handles it all in the background, and the person building the micro-app will be charged for Twilio’s services as a pass-through fee by Lovable, Bolt, or another Vibe-coding platform.
While Sapiom is currently focused on B2B solutions, its technology could eventually empower personal AI agents to handle consumer transactions. The hope is that individuals will one day trust agents to make independent financial decisions, like ordering an Uber or shopping on Amazon. While that future is exciting, Zerbib doesn’t believe AI will magically force people to buy more things, which is why he’s focusing on creating financial footing for businesses instead.
