Seattle's firmly raises $15 million to plug merchants into AI shopping agents

Seattle-based firmly, which connects merchants to AI shopping channels without code, has raised a $15 million Series A round led by Squarepoint Capital. J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard and Samsung NEXT joined the round, along with Alumni Ventures, ARK Invest, Benhamou Global Ventures, Granada Funds, Hike Ventures, The Mercantile Companies and Versus Ventures. The round brings the company's total funding to about $20 million.

Its product, firmly Connect, is a single no-code connection that lets a merchant sell through AI agents, marketplaces, social networks and shoppable ads while staying the merchant of record and keeping its own payment provider, customer relationships and transaction data. The company says its network can reach more than 11 million merchants representing more than $900 billion in gross merchandise volume. Alongside the funding, firmly launched Ask Agent, a conversational shopping assistant merchants can add to their own websites with a single line of JavaScript; it says early deployments lifted conversion rates by up to 18 percent and average order value by up to 23 percent.

"AI is quickly creating new storefronts for commerce, but merchants cannot build a new integration every time one emerges," said Kumar Senthil, co-founder and CEO. Adobe expects AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites to grow 130 percent year over year this holiday season. firmly says the new money will go toward expanding firmly Connect globally and adding merchants and shopping destinations to its network.