firmly, an agentic commerce platform connecting merchants to high intent digital channels, has announced a $15 million Series A funding round led by Squarepoint Capital, with participation from investors including J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard and Samsung NEXT.

The company has also launched Ask Agent, an end-to-end conversational shopping experience for merchant websites that includes AI powered natural language product discovery with a real-time catalogue, in-chat checkout and traditional customer support functionality.

The capital will be used to accelerate the growth of firmly Connect globally with merchants and across AI agents, marketplaces, social networks, shoppable advertising platforms and other commerce destinations.

“AI is quickly creating new storefronts for commerce, but merchants cannot build a new integration every time one emerges,” says Kumar Senthil, Co-founder and CEO at firmly.

“Our north star has always been to enable the merchants to sell in any channel with ZERO engineering effort. Unlike other players in this space who expect the merchant to integrate with them, firmly Connect integrates with the merchants and gives them complete control to sell wherever their customers choose to shop. This funding allows us to bring more merchants and more destinations onto that infrastructure much faster.”

"Whether a shopping experience is human led or agent led, merchants need one reliable connection to all of it. Today's protocol standards are fragmented and can be slow to implement for merchants - firmly delivers the infrastructure layer that bridges the gap, combining the flexibility of browser automation use by Muse or Instinct with the security, Trust and efficiency of deterministic protocols like UCP, all without a single line of merchant code." says Damien Balsan, Co-founder and President at firmly.

2026 RTIH Innovation Awards

AI was a key focus area at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards.

Check out our winners here.

The awards celebrate global retail technology innovation in a fast moving omnichannel world. Our winners were revealed at the 2026 RTIH Innovation Awards Ceremony, taking place at The HAC in Central London on Wednesday, 4th November.

The event consisted of a drinks reception, three course meal, awards ceremony presided over by award winning stand-up comedian, presenter, actor and broadcaster, Aurie Styla, and after party until 1am.