Orthogonal

Roadmap & Position in Agentic Payments

Enables AI agents to autonomously discover, access, and pay for APIs through a unified marketplace.

Company Overview

Builds agentic payment infrastructure enabling AI agents to autonomously discover, access, and pay for APIs via a unified marketplace, eliminating traditional API key management and billing friction.

What They're Building

The company's public product roadmap & what they're committed to building.

Orthogonal has publicly launched a unified API marketplace with hundreds of integrations, pay-as-you-go billing, an open-source CLI tool, a "Skill Catalog" of pre-built agent-ready API integrations, and MCP compatibility. Works with OpenClaw, Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. 20+ named API partners (ScrapeGraph, Linkup, People Data Labs, Aviato, Olostep, etc.). Partnerships with YC-backed companies including Precip (W24), Riveter (F24), Andi (W22), Shofo (W26), Fiber AI (S23), Sixtyfour (X25). Starting with Search, Scraping, Datasets, and AI Model APIs.

Latest Intelligence

Zeitgeist tracks private signals to determine where the company is heading strategically.

APIs Get A Payment Rail For Agents

May 13, 2026

Confidence:

High

New Intel: Orthogonal is building a marketplace where AI agents can discover, access, and pay for APIs. With MCP support and YC partner density, it could become the payment rail for agent tool use.

Founder and Key Execs

Christian Pickett, Co-Founder & CEO

Co-Founder & CEO

Bera, Co-Founder

Co-Founder

Founder Force Multiplier

Christian Pickett worked on payments at Coinbase (payment rails across Japan, Australia, Canada, EU) and rebuilt billing dashboards and enterprise usage flows at Vercel , directly relevant to agentic payments infrastructure.

Funding History

2025 | Christian Pickett and Bera co-found Orthogonal.
2025 | Launch of unified API marketplace, Skill Catalog, and open-source CLI.
2026 | Accepted into Y Combinator Winter 2026 batch.
2026 | 20+ API partners integrated; partnerships with 10+ YC-backed companies.

Competitors

Agentic Payments

Skyfire (Visa-like agentic payment network), Paygentic (real-time microtransaction rails), Nevermined ("PayPal for AI agents"), Payman AI.

Agent Infrastructure

Coinbase AgentKit (crypto wallets for agents), Stripe Agent Toolkit (agentic checkout).

API Marketplaces

RapidAPI, AWS Marketplace.

Emerging Protocols

Google AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol), x402, ERC-8004.

Orthogonal

's Moat:

First marketplace and payment layer for agent-to-API commerce. 20+ API partners and 10+ YC company integrations create a two-sided network effect. Coinbase payments and Vercel billing experience means the founder has built exactly this type of infrastructure before. If agents become the primary API consumer, Orthogonal sits on the transaction layer.

How They're Leveraging AI

Agentic API Orchestration

Autonomous API discovery and payment orchestration enabling AI agents to find, authenticate, and pay for any API without human intervention.

Microtransaction Billing Engine

Real-time usage-based billing and programmable payment infrastructure for API microtransactions between autonomous agents and API providers.

Agent Trust & Identity

Agent identity verification, trust scoring, and access control layer that determines which agents can access which APIs and at what privilege level.

AI Use Overview:

Using agentic API orchestration for tool discovery, microtransaction billing for pay-as-you-go access, and agent trust and identity verification.

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