Firmly has raised $15 million, according to MLQ.ai, with Squarepoint, J.P. Morgan Payments and Mastercard backing the round. The stated purpose is unusually specific for a startup funding announcement: connecting merchants to AI shopping agents.
That investor mix is the part worth noticing. Even through the foggy language that tends to gather around anything branded “AI,” this reads less like a consumer app pitch than a bet on transaction infrastructure. Pulse 2.0 likewise described the round as a Series A meant to expand “agentic commerce infrastructure,” which is a clean example of an industry phrase doing too much work. Strip it down and the claim is simpler: Firmly wants to build the rails that let merchants interact with AI-driven shopping tools.
What the available reports support, and no more, is that money has been raised for that aim. They do not establish adoption, revenue, or whether merchants and shoppers will accept AI agents as a meaningful layer in commerce rather than another intermediary in the queue.
Still, a funding announcement can reveal where investors think the bottlenecks might be. In this case, the story is not that AI shopping exists in theory. It is that Firmly says the connection between merchants and those agents is now important enough to fund.
Dua Mifsud 
Gabriel Fenech 
Ryan C