Curless is institutional payments infrastructure for the agent economy. One SDK for agent-native identity, scoped authorization, multi-rail settlement and tamper-evident audit — across cards, stablecoins and local digital wallets.
1 // Authorize an agent purchase under a scoped mandate 2 import { Curless } from "@curless/agent-pay"; 3 4 const intent = await curless.intents.create({ 5 agent: "agt_chatgpt_5xQ2", 6 mandate: { cap: 42000, currency: "USD", scope: "travel.book" }, 7 merchant: "mer_marriott_global", 8 rail: "auto", // card | stablecoin | local-wallet 9 audit: { kya: true, signature: "a-jwt" } 10 }); 11 12 // → settlement.cleared in 380ms · chargeback-protected
Internet traffic is no longer human-first. By 2030, autonomous agents will execute trillions in commerce annually — but the rails beneath them are fundamentally not agent-native.
“Existing infrastructure — identity, authorization, settlement and disputes — is fundamentally not agent-native. The window for first-mover infrastructure lock-in is 6–12 months.”
Four structural failures and a combinatorial standards problem make today's rails uneconomic, unsafe and unscalable for autonomous agents.
Agents are neither natural persons nor legal entities — existing KYC/KYB compliance frameworks do not map to a non-human transactor.
KYC/KYB does not applyLegacy OTP/SMS flows require humans; agents cannot receive codes. Workarounds rely on virtual cards with hard caps — unsuited for recurring scoped mandates.
OTP / VCC does not scaleCard minimums and percentage fees render high-volume sub-$10 micropayments structurally uneconomic for autonomous agent transactions.
Micropayments uneconomicChargebacks assume a fraudulent “this wasn't me” scenario — the system fails completely when an explicitly authorized agent executed the transaction.
Chargebacks misfireBuilt-in identity, scoped authorization, policy and risk evaluation, and tamper-evident audit. Two pillars: accept payments from agents, and let agents pay safely on your behalf.
Add agent-payment acceptance to existing PSPs and gateways with a single integration. Merchants accept inbound payments directly from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and customised enterprise agents.
Enterprise agents execute secure, autonomous purchases through auto-renewing, mandate-verified spending limits — every action signed, logged and underwritten.
We strictly underwrite every agent transaction: payment-correctness guarantee, automatic dispute resolution, and chargeback protection. If your agent errors, we make you whole.
Untrusted reasoning is strictly separated from trusted settlement. Agents issue signed payment intents; the core executes them under mandate, policy and tamper-evident audit.
No cryptographic key material. No direct payment-rail access. The reasoning plane proposes; the settlement plane disposes.
Identity, policy & risk evaluation, multi-rail routing, and tamper-evident audit. Built to the standards regulators apply to electronic money institutions, not merchants.
Today, an integration layer. Tomorrow, an orchestration plane. At maturity, a balance-sheet bank for the agent economy.
Agent payment processing and standards translation. One SDK lets any agent safely receive and pay across all major rails — including cards, stablecoins and local digital wallets.
Agent-to-agent autonomous optimization. A native KYA engine, reputation graph, and policy guardrails enable real-time autonomous decisioning for best price, supplier and timing.
Credit, treasury and balance-sheet products. Subject-backed agent credit lines underwritten purely on track record; automated treasury auto-sweeps idle balances into yield.
Even a 2–5% blended take-rate across processing, compliance and AgentFi yields a fee pool larger than today's global card-acquiring market — concentrated in a new, agent-native infrastructure layer.
Sources: McKinsey “The Agent Commerce Decade” (2026); BCG payments fee-pool model; Curless analysis.
More volume → richer data → sharper pricing and deeper credit → more volume. The same compounding loop that built every modern payments leader — built natively for agents.
Three sequenced motions: design partnerships harden the core, marketplace distribution drives bottom-up adoption, and vertical dominance defends the moat.
Sign top-tier OTAs, marketplaces and fintech partners. Co-build use cases, harden the enterprise API, complete product-market-fit validation.
Listed natively in OpenAI, Anthropic and Marketingforce marketplaces. Embedded into enterprise agent stacks for bottom-up mid-market adoption.
Default choice for hotels, hospitality and online commerce. Horizontal expansion into high-frequency agents (smart-vehicle, B2B procurement).
Stripe and Adyen retrofit agents onto a human-payments core. Banks haven't started. Curless ships the only fully agent-native, multi-rail, multi-region core today.
| Capability | Curless | Stripe | Adyen | Traditional Bank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agent-native architecture | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Competitive pricing across all transaction sizes | ✓ | ✕ | ~ | ✕ |
| Non-US (EU + APAC) compliance & data privacy | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-rail · card + stablecoin + local digital wallets | ✓ | ✓ | ~ | ~ |
| AgentFi credit + AgentCap treasury | ✓ | ✕ | ~ | ✕ |