View from the Office. 

I met Craig DeWitt, co-founder of startup Skyfire, for breakfast at Balthazar. I had the omelette with gruyere; Craig went with the healthier oatmeal.

Skyfire, which Craig co-founded with Amir Sarhangi, is building a payment system for Al agents. Their elevator pitch is that Skyfire  is “Visa or Stripe for AI.”

It’s a hard concept to get your head around because it envisions a world that is just emerging in which AI programs are enabled to autonomously spend money to buy software and data. 

One way to understand the utility and enormous opportunity is to realize that AI agents are likely to take over so many tasks currently done by humans, particularly gathering information.

To be efficient, the programs will need to be able to make payments, especially for tiny amounts. 

Craig said most people think of travel as an obvious use case. They imagine AI planning a trip but understand that humans still have to input credit cards. Skyfire would eliminate that issue. 

We also talked about how Wall Street firms could use Skyfire to gather data. That scenario could significantly disrupt the B2B Saas subscription models that dominate the market for data currently. 

Craig has been wrestling with how to optimize payments for most of his career. He spent a few years at Bloomberg before getting an MBA and then working at Ripple as a senior director of product. That was where he met Amir, who was the VP of product and services.

Skyfire recently raised $8.5 million from VCs including Neuberger Berman, Inception Capital, Arrington Capital, and others.

If you want to understand how AI agents are going to change the world, Craig can be reached via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.