This Week: Startup Skyfire launches payment network for AI agents; State Street; SteelEye and more

Skyfire launches payment network for ‘AI agents’

Amir Sarhangi likes to say that his new company, Skyfire Systems, is like “Visa for AI agents” and the aim of the startup is to completely revolutionize the payments space—a big idea, but he and the vendor’s cofounder, Craig DeWitt, have a lot of experience in the sector.

Sarhangi was the founder and CEO of Jibe Mobile, which was acquired by Google in 2015. Today, Jibe’s messaging infrastructure underpins Android Messenger. He eventually left Google to join Ripple as vice president of products. It was there that he met Craig DeWitt, one of the earliest developers at Ripple, where he helped build the vendor’s On Demand Liquidity payments offering.

The problem that Sarhangi and DeWitt noticed was that payment workflows that use AI to automate processes tend to “get stuck” and, thus, require the help of a human. The reason is that AI agents don’t have access to the payments layer, Sarhangi tells WatersTechnology.

“Any time there is a financial decision that needs to be made, an AI agent needs a human being to be involved, whether it’s to create an account, to pay for something, or to receive payment; only [when the human is involved] can it continue on doing what it was doing,” he says.

Additionally, when they dug deeper, they found there was a whole monetization layer missing.

“There are a lot of large language models, and more coming every day,” says Sarhangi, who serves as the company’s CEO. “We believe that it’s a space that is going to continue to be fragmented—there’s not going to be a single LLM that dominates. And they’re going to have different specializations. Secondly, if you’re a developer today, you’re using a ton of different services to build your AI agents, which means you have to go out there and essentially buy tokens at all these different places to be able to create the experiences you want to create.”

He continues: “What we set out to do is automate an AI agent so it can hold balances, pay for things, or be able to receive payments because it is selling something. … Think of us as Visa for AI.”

Because a human always has to be involved in the workflow, this significantly slows down a firm’s ability to make payments and tap into the LLM economy. (The vendor estimates that the market size of agent-to-agent commerce could reach $46 billion over the next three years.) The thesis was that if Skyfire can solve this infrastructure problem—AI agent “rails,” as the vendor likes to call it—and allow AI agents to pay and get paid, that would free up humans to address more important issues and potentially save the firm time and money. Also, it would allow firms to be exposed to a whole new—and massive—audience: the bots themselves.

This led Sarhangi and DeWitt to create Skyfire. Launched this year, the San Francisco-based company has received $8.5 million in seed funding from a list of big-name financial institutions (see Box).

As an example of how the platform works, DeWitt, Skyfire’s head of product, points to the car manufacturing industry.

“These car manufacturers have spent a ton of money on AI enabling their supply chain. [For one of the Skyfire’s early users], the company is buying bolts in Indonesia and they need to be shipped to India to be put together,” DeWitt says. “The AI is intelligent, so it is sending a command to the manufacturer in Indonesia saying, for example, send another bolt for this. But at the end of the month, they have human beings that are actually reconciling everything that happened and then send a wire payment from the Indian plant to the Indonesian plant. It’s a huge pain in the butt and waste of time.”

Skyfire’s platform, which is currently in beta and which is expected to be fully live for all users by year’s end, gives AI agents the ability to source and pay for goods and services using their “own bank account” (meaning the agent) without the need for human intervention. It provides AI agents with an instant, global, and open payment system for fully autonomous transactions across AI agents, LLMs, data platforms, service providers, and other goods and services. 

The offering includes secure wallet access, verifiable agent identity, and an open payment protocol for service requests, purchasing decisions, and instant transactions, again, without human intervention. Like Visa, Skyfire is paid a nominal fee on each transaction made on the platform.

The thinking is that AI needs more autonomy to transact freely—the vendor obviously allows users to put in appropriate guidelines and limits for what an AI agent can do—so the platform equips agents with identity, budgets, and a universal payment system, which can be created in just 10 minutes, according to the vendor, via its software development kit.

“The infrastructure opportunity for AI agents is massive and new developments will drive advancement in Web3 across applications,” said Michael Arrington of Arrington Capital, which is an investor in Skyfire, in a statement. “Skyfire has identified a very critical need at this point in time, assembled a team that has revolutionized payments before, understands the needs of this market deeply, and is moving fast enough to become the industry standard before the traditional payments players have a chance to catch up. We’ve seen this story play out with the likes of PayPal and Stripe, and are excited to see what Skyfire is going to accomplish next.”

State Street, Taurus partner on digital assets

State Street and Taurus, a global leader in digital asset infrastructure, announced a strategic agreement that will deliver new digital assets for State Street Bank and Trust Company clients. Through the pairing, State Street will leverage Taurus’ custody, tokenization, and node-management solutions to automate the issuance and servicing of digital assets, including digital securities and fund management vehicles.

SteelEye rolls out new trade surveillance offering

SteelEye has launched a new trade surveillance feature, dubbed Cross-Product Detection. The tool is aimed at guarding against the threat of cross-product market manipulation, which occurs when someone places orders or trades in one financial instrument to illicitly impact the price of another, either on the same trading platform or a separate one. For example, a trader could place a large trade order for an equity to positively impact the price of a related derivative contract.

The algo-driven solution analyzes trading activity across multiple instruments and proactively identifies cross-product manipulation patterns. Upon being flagged, the system generates a potential market abuse alert, enabling swift action to protect market integrity. This means compliance teams can determine if an alert is a true concern or a legitimate market activity influenced by cross-product dynamics.

TNS adds connectivity for new Miax exchange

Transaction Network Services has added connectivity and market data support for the recently launched Miax Sapphire Options Exchange. TNS will provide low-latency market data and order routing access to the marketplace.

Sapphire will be Miax’s fourth national securities exchange for US multi-listed options and will operate both an electronic exchange and physical trading floor to be located in Miami, Florida. 

Beeks expands partnership with JSE, IPC

Beeks Group is expanding its partnership with the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and IPC Systems. This extension will see Beeks’ Exchange Cloud service deployed at the JSE’s Teraco datacenter, bolstering the exchange’s Colo 2.0 offering with enhanced dual location disaster recovery capabilities. Colo 2.0 is a managed infrastructure-as-a-service powered by Beeks’ Exchange Cloud, in collaboration with IPC. The service provides JSE customers with modern hosting and connectivity solutions, accessing on-demand private cloud computing, and low-latency analytics.

“Since the launch of Colo 2.0 in September 2023, JSE has seen significant adoption of the Colo 2.0 service by customers, demonstrating a clear demand for the product offering,” said Tebalo Tsoaeli, chief innovation officer at the JSE, in a statement. “This has resulted in additional demand for a secondary solution aimed at addressing the redundancy and disaster recovery requirements of existing customers. Through our partnership with Beeks and IPC, JSE seeks to power a truly cloud-based marketplace infrastructure that is modern, hyper-scalable, ultra-resilient, highly performant, and accessible to all market participants.”

Broadridge lands Valverde as client

Valverde Investment Partners, a newly established Singapore-based independent investment management firm specializing in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) equities, has tapped Broadridge Financial Solutions’ software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based investment management offering, which includes portfolio management, trade order management, and risk analytics.

“Demand is rising as Asean is increasingly recognized as a standalone investment asset class, and having proven operational technology in place is key to our ability to deliver our innovative investment strategies for years to come,” said John Foo, founder and CIO of Valverde, in a statement.

Valverde COO Hock Meng Tan added that Broadridge’s offering “provides the operational efficiency, flexibility, and scalability we need to deliver bespoke client solutions at the scale the Asean market now demands.”