Mastercard has named the 22 companies joining the first cohort of its Start Path Agentic Commerce & Services track, the startup engagement program's opening intake dedicated to agent-driven payments. The announcement, reported by The Paypers on September 2, activates a track Mastercard created in January for startups building agent platforms, agent-native tools, and emerging agentic payment flows.
Highlights#
The intake spans the full agent commerce stack. On the money side, SolvaPay lets businesses sell to and get paid by AI agents, Skyfire issues verified identity and payment credentials that agents can use across the open internet, and Crossmint backs fintechs launching stablecoin wallets, on- and off-ramps, and embedded infrastructure.
A second group targets trust. Tunic Pay helps banks detect scams in agentic payments by reading the wider context of a transaction, t54 verifies agent identity and scores risk before merchants transact, and PayOS profiles every entity in a payment, from cards to agents, before funds move. Simetrik adds transaction-level, audit-grade verification across the payment flow.
The remainder covers merchant readiness and verticals: Firmly and ReFiBuy prepare merchant catalogs and checkout for agent shoppers, Nevermined supplies a commerce logic layer for verifying and settling agent purchases on existing rails, and Testudo offers AI liability insurance for US companies deploying generative AI. Start Path has worked with more than 500 companies across 60-plus countries since 2014, and cohort members gain access to Mastercard's partner and customer network.
Forkast reads the move as ecosystem-building rather than protocol-building: rather than define its own agent commerce standard, Mastercard positions itself as the network that validates and connects the builders. The track joins Mastercard Agent Pay, the company's adoption of Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, and its work with Microsoft to bring Agent Pay to Copilot Checkout.
Why it matters#
The roster doubles as a map of unsolved problems: agent identity, transaction risk, and audit trails that can survive a dispute. Those are precisely the reputation and escrow gaps that decide whether autonomous transactions clear without a human in the loop, and Mastercard now has 22 teams working on them inside its network.