Stockholm-based fintech startup SolvaPay has successfully secured €2.4 million (approximately $2.6 million) in a pre-seed funding round aimed at revolutionizing how artificial intelligence (AI) agents conduct financial transactions. The investment round was led by MS&AD Ventures and Redstone, with significant participation from Antler and Greens Ventures. This capital injection marks a pivotal moment for the burgeoning "agentic economy," where autonomous software entities are increasingly required to navigate financial ecosystems without human intervention. Founded in early 2025, SolvaPay is positioning itself as the foundational financial layer for a world where AI models do not just assist users but act as independent economic participants.
The primary objective of SolvaPay is to solve a fundamental friction point in the current digital landscape: the incompatibility of traditional payment rails with machine-driven commerce. While existing payment processors like Stripe, PayPal, and traditional banking systems were designed for human-to-human or human-to-business interactions—requiring manual authorization, multi-factor authentication, and credit card credentials—SolvaPay is building "machine-native" infrastructure. This allows AI agents to autonomously discover, negotiate, and pay for digital services, APIs, and computational resources across disparate platforms.
The Genesis of the Agentic Economy and SolvaPay’s Mission
The concept of the "agentic economy" refers to a shift in digital commerce where AI agents—powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and specialized algorithms—take over complex workflows. These tasks often require the agent to "hire" other specialized AI services. For instance, a legal AI agent might need to pay a document-parsing agent to process a specific file, or a travel-planning agent might need to execute real-time micro-payments to various booking APIs.
Viggo Stenseth, a key figure at SolvaPay, emphasizes that the maturity of any technological revolution is tethered to its financial infrastructure. "Every major technological shift has needed a financial layer before it could become a real economy," Stenseth stated during the funding announcement. "The internet needed it; e-commerce needed it. Now, we’ve reached the same point with the agentic economy, but naturally, the transaction types, the speeds, and the compliance required for this are impossible within the existing infrastructure. We’ve built what was missing. The timing is not early; it is exactly right."
SolvaPay’s model is built on the premise that traditional billing cycles (monthly or annual subscriptions) are ill-suited for the micro-task nature of AI. Instead, the platform enables granular pay-per-use billing and automated usage tracking. This allows developers to monetize their AI services at the level of individual queries or specific computational outputs, rather than through rigid, high-barrier subscription tiers.
Technical Architecture and Revenue Model
SolvaPay’s infrastructure is designed to be embedded directly into workflows, APIs, and conversational interfaces. By integrating at the protocol level, the platform removes the fragmentation that currently forces AI agents into "walled gardens" or closed ecosystems. The machine-native rails facilitate real-time settlement, which is critical for agents that may perform thousands of micro-transactions per hour.
From a commercial standpoint, SolvaPay has introduced a transparent and scalable pricing structure. The company applies a 1% transaction fee on top of standard processing costs. This positions the startup not just as a payment gateway, but as a comprehensive monetization layer for the next generation of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and AI-native applications. By providing a unified interface for payments, SolvaPay reduces the engineering overhead for startups looking to monetize their AI models globally.
The platform also addresses the "discovery" problem. In a mature agentic economy, agents must be able to find the most cost-effective and high-performing service for a specific task. SolvaPay’s infrastructure includes elements that allow agents to verify the financial terms of a service before engaging, ensuring that autonomous transactions remain within the budgetary constraints set by the human owner of the agent.
Strategic Backing and the Insurance Perspective
The involvement of MS&AD Ventures, the venture capital arm of one of Japan’s largest insurance conglomerates, highlights a significant strategic trend: the intersection of AI, finance, and risk management. As AI agents begin to handle money and make procurement decisions independently, the risk profile of digital businesses changes fundamentally.
Jon Soberg, Managing Partner at MS&AD Ventures, noted that the reliability of these transactions is a prerequisite for trust in autonomous systems. "As AI agents begin to transact autonomously, trust and reliability become just as important as speed and capability," Soberg said. "SolvaPay sits directly in the flow of those transactions, which makes it a uniquely strategic position as new forms of digital risk emerge. We see this as an important building block for the next generation of the digital economy."
For the insurance industry, SolvaPay provides a data-rich environment that could eventually inform new types of coverage. If an AI agent makes an unauthorized purchase or fails to fulfill a contract paid for via SolvaPay, the transaction logs and embedded compliance layers provided by the platform will be essential for claims processing and liability determination. This "financial audit trail" for machines is a critical component for insurers looking to underwrite the risks of the AI-driven future.
Chronology of the Machine-Native Payment Evolution
To understand the necessity of SolvaPay, it is helpful to view the evolution of payment infrastructure over the last several decades:
- Phase 1: The Credit Era (1950s–1990s): Financial systems were built around physical cards and human signatures, designed for face-to-face retail.
- Phase 2: The E-commerce Era (1990s–2010s): The rise of the internet required "gateways" like PayPal and Stripe to translate credit card data into digital packets for web browsers.
- Phase 3: The Mobile and API Era (2010s–2024): Payments became embedded in apps (Uber, Airbnb) and subscription management platforms (Chargebee), but still relied on human-owned accounts and manual authentication (2FA).
- Phase 4: The Agentic Era (2025–Present): Payments transition to being "machine-native." Transactions are initiated, authorized, and settled by software entities. This is the stage SolvaPay is pioneering.
By launching in 2025, SolvaPay is entering the market just as LLMs are evolving from "chatbots" into "action-oriented agents" capable of using tools and navigating the web.
Market Analysis and Supporting Data
The demand for machine-to-machine (M2M) payments is projected to grow exponentially as AI integration deepens across industries. According to recent market research, the global AI market is expected to reach nearly $2 trillion by 2030, but a significant portion of that value remains "locked" because agents cannot easily transact with one another across different platforms.
Industry data suggests that the "API Economy" is already worth trillions, yet the majority of API interactions are governed by static contracts. SolvaPay’s entry into the market aligns with the shift toward "Dynamic API Consumption," where pricing is determined in real-time based on demand, compute intensity, and output quality.
Furthermore, the rise of decentralized finance (DeFi) and blockchain had previously attempted to solve machine-to-machine payments; however, high volatility and regulatory hurdles hindered mainstream adoption. SolvaPay differentiates itself by utilizing traditional fiat-based rails and compliance frameworks, making it more palatable for enterprise adoption while maintaining the speed and automation typical of crypto-assets.
Future Outlook and Operational Roadmap
With the €2.4 million pre-seed round, SolvaPay has outlined a clear path for the next 18 months. The primary focus will be on:
- Engineering Talent: Expanding the Stockholm-based team with experts in distributed systems, fintech compliance, and AI integration.
- Protocol Development: Refining the machine-native payment rails to ensure they can handle high-frequency micro-transactions with near-zero latency.
- Early Adoption Partnerships: Collaborating with AI labs and SaaS providers to integrate SolvaPay as the default payment option for their autonomous agents.
- Compliance and Security: Developing robust frameworks to prevent "rogue agent" spending and ensuring that all transactions adhere to international Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) standards, adapted for the machine age.
As businesses move away from monolithic software toward modular, AI-driven ecosystems, the need for a standardized "financial language" for machines becomes undeniable. SolvaPay’s mission to build this language suggests that the next great fintech giant may not be one that serves people, but one that serves the algorithms people create.
The strategic support from Antler and Redstone further validates this vision. These firms have a history of backing infrastructure that anticipates shifts in developer behavior. By focusing on the "monetization layer" of AI, SolvaPay is positioning itself at the center of the most significant economic transition since the dawn of the internet.
In conclusion, SolvaPay’s successful funding round is more than just a capital raise; it is a signal that the financial world is preparing for a future where the majority of economic transactions may no longer involve a human "clicking" a button. As AI agents become the new consumers, the infrastructure provided by SolvaPay will likely become the "plumbing" of a new, global, autonomous economy.
