Orthogonal
Product & Competitive Intelligence
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.
Competitive Advantage & Moat
Product Roadmap & Public Announcements
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.
Signals & Private Analysis
GitHub activity and open-source CLI development suggest active work on MCP compatibility and expanded SDK support. Founder backgrounds (ex-Coinbase payments, ex-Vercel billing, ex-Google reCAPTCHA/Maps/Amazon Robotics) indicate likely development of programmable wallet infrastructure and stablecoin payment rails. Partner density within YC's agentic AI cohort suggests a potential play to become the default payment rail for YC-ecosystem agents. Primary risk is platform dependency if Anthropic, OpenAI, or major frameworks build native tool marketplaces.
Product Roadmap Priorities
Autonomous API discovery and payment orchestration enabling AI agents to find, authenticate, and pay for any API without human intervention.
Instead of a developer manually signing up for dozens of APIs and managing keys, an AI agent uses Orthogonal to instantly find and pay for any API it needs on its own.
It's like giving your AI agent a universal credit card and a phonebook for every API on the internet, so it never has to ask you to sign up for anything again.
Real-time usage-based billing and programmable payment infrastructure for API microtransactions between autonomous agents and API providers.
Orthogonal automatically tracks every tiny API call an AI agent makes and handles instant payments to providers, like a smart electricity meter for the API economy.
It's like Uber's surge pricing meets your electric bill — every API sip gets metered, priced, and paid for automatically, so neither the agent nor the provider ever has to chase an invoice.
Agent identity verification, trust scoring, and access control layer that determines which agents can access which APIs and at what privilege level.
Orthogonal is building a system that verifies AI agents the way banks verify customers — making sure every agent accessing an API is who it claims to be and is authorized to spend.
It's like building a TSA PreCheck for AI agents — the trustworthy ones breeze through to any API, while sketchy bots get flagged and grounded before they can cause damage.
Company Overview
Key Team Members
- Christian Pickett, Co-Founder & CEO
- Bera, 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. Bera worked on reCAPTCHA and Maps APIs at Google and at Amazon Robotics, and is a 2x ACM ICPC World Finalist. They met at McGill University and combine deep payments infrastructure expertise with world-class API platform and security experience.
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.
