Seattle-based firmly, which describes itself as a “no-code” agentic commerce platform, announced a $15 million Series A on November 5, led by Squarepoint Capital. Strategic investors including J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard and Samsung NEXT took part, alongside Alumni Ventures, ARK Invest, Benhamou Global Ventures, Granada Funds, Hike Ventures, The Mercantile Companies and Versus Ventures. The round brings total funding to approximately $20 million, according to the company’s release. Valuation was not disclosed.
One connection for many AI storefronts
firmly’s pitch is that merchants shouldn’t have to build a new integration each time an AI assistant, social platform or shoppable ad surface starts selling products. Its firmly Connect platform creates a single no-code connection so merchants can sell through new channels while remaining merchant of record and keeping their payment provider, customer relationships and transaction data.
The company says firmly Connect can give AI assistants, publishers, social platforms and other commerce channels access to more than 11 million merchants representing over $900 billion in gross merchandise value. That figure is the company’s own claim. firmly says the new capital will go toward growing Connect globally across AI agents, marketplaces, social networks and shoppable advertising platforms.
Co-founder and President Damien Balsan framed the technical approach as combining the flexibility of browser automation with the security and efficiency of deterministic protocols such as UCP, without merchant-side code.
Ask Agent brings the assistant to the merchant’s own site
Alongside the funding, firmly launched Ask Agent, a conversational shopping experience for merchant websites. Shoppers describe what they want in natural language and get recommendations drawn from the merchant’s real-time catalog, pricing and inventory. They can check out inside the conversation, and the tool also handles loyalty, cross-sell and post-purchase customer service. firmly says it works with a merchant’s existing commerce infrastructure and can be installed with a single line of JavaScript.
The company reports that early merchant deployments have seen conversion-rate improvements of up to 18% and average order value increases of up to 23%. These are vendor-reported results from early deployments, and the release does not name the merchants or describe how the figures were measured.
The release also cites an Adobe expectation that AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites will grow 130% year over year this holiday season, a forecast firmly uses to argue for faster merchant adoption of agentic shopping.