Sponge

Roadmap & Position in Agent Economy Infrastructure

Financial infrastructure enabling AI agents to autonomously hold, manage, and spend money.

Company Overview

Builds financial infrastructure for the agent economy, enabling AI agents to autonomously hold, manage, and disburse funds across fiat and crypto via programmable wallets and no-code payment gateways.

What They're Building

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

Sponge has publicly announced two core products: Sponge Wallet (agent-native wallets with programmable spending controls, multi-chain support, and fiat+crypto capabilities) and Sponge Gateway (no-code business onboarding via API spec upload so businesses can accept payments from AI agents). They've highlighted first-class support for Claude's Model Context Protocol (MCP) and plan to expand chain coverage across Ethereum, Base, and Solana. Teams like AgentMail and Steel are already using Sponge.

Latest Intelligence

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

AI Agents Need Wallets And Spending Controls

May 13, 2026

Confidence:

High

New Intel: Sponge is building wallets and payment gateways for AI agents, with MCP support, fiat and crypto rails, and programmable spending controls. The next layer may be Know Your Agent compliance for autonomous transactions.

Founder and Key Execs

Jae Choi, Co-Founder

Co-Founder

Eric Zhang, Co-Founder

Co-Founder

Rishab Luthra, Co-Founder

Co-Founder

Founder Force Multiplier

This is likely the most qualified possible team to build financial infrastructure for AI agents, as they literally built crypto payments at Stripe.

Funding History

2025-2026 | Jae Choi, Eric Zhang, and Rishab Luthra co-found Sponge.
2026 | Accepted into Y Combinator Winter 2026 batch.
2026 | Seed round (amount undisclosed).
2026 | Piloting Sponge Wallet and Sponge Gateway with early adopters including AgentMail and Steel.

Competitors

Agent Payment Infra

Skyfire (multi-chain agent wallets, enterprise focus), Nevermined (MCP/x402/A2A protocol support), Lava (credit-based agent payments).

Adjacent Fintech

Stripe (incumbent payments, expanding into crypto/stablecoins), Circle (USDC infrastructure).

Emerging

Payman (agent-to-human payments), Paid (business payment acceptance), various stealth agentic finance startups.

Sponge

's Moat:

Stripe crypto payments team experience building the infrastructure that Sponge extends to agents. Programmable wallets with spending controls across fiat and crypto. First-class MCP support means Claude and other AI agents can transact natively. If agent commerce scales, Sponge sits on the financial rails.

How They're Leveraging AI

Autonomous payment routing

AI agents autonomously route payments across fiat and crypto rails, selecting optimal paths and authorizing transactions without human intervention.

Agent behavioral anomaly detection

Real-time ML-driven fraud detection and behavioral risk scoring purpose-built for AI agent transaction patterns, not human spending behavior.

LLM API negotiation engine

LLMs autonomously parse business API specifications, negotiate service terms, and enable agents to discover and transact with new service providers without human configuration.

AI Use Overview:

Using autonomous payment routing optimization, agent behavioral anomaly detection for security, and LLM API negotiation for service procurement.

More Similar Companies

Tasklet

Runs cloud AI agents for recurring knowledge-work workflows.

Firebase-grade infra founders are attacking workflow automation as LLMs start to operate software, with early ARR and USV as both customer and investor.

Decagon

AI agents that autonomously handle enterprise customer support across chat, email, voice, and SMS.

Agentic AI for customer support is one of the few GenAI categories with clean ROI math, and Decagon has locked in the blue-chip logo sweep that compounds into category default status.

Manus

Autonomous AI agent platform that executes multi-step business workflows end-to-end

A model-agnostic orchestration layer with real browser and shell execution captured viral enterprise demand faster than any US agent startup, a thesis validated by Meta's $2B acquisition.

Bubble Lab

Gives ops teams an AI super-employee in Slack that automates cross-platform workflows.

Zapier and Make require users to think in workflows. Bubble Lab's Pearl lives in Slack and runs multi-step operations (Jira, Stripe, Notion) from plain English, which means ops teams adopt it without learning a new tool.

Back To All Companies >