Each month we’ll highlight one of the founders of Okta Ventures’ portfolio companies. You’ll get to know more about them and learn how they work with Okta. This month we’re speaking with Ilan Zerbib of Sapiom.
What is Sapiom and what is your mission?
Sapiom gives AI agents trusted access to the API economy. We abstract identity, wallets, policy, risk, and settlement into one integration, enabling agents and AI-built applications to safely transact with the real world.
Our mission starts from a single premise: the next trillion buyers won’t be human. AI agents can reason, plan, and execute. But the moment they need to interact with the real economy, everything breaks. Current financial systems assume a human owns the credential and approves each transaction.
But if you give an agent broad spending authority, you’ve handed it a blank check. Lock it down enough to be safe, and it becomes useless in production. Either way, deployment stalls, and the agentic economy fails to progress.
Sapiom is building the financial system that makes machine-to-business commerce possible.
What were you doing prior to Sapiom that led you to this moment?
I’ve spent the last decade operating at the bleeding edge of the current financial stack – first as a founder at Earny (acquired in 2021), then at Shopify, where I spent nearly five years leading engineering in payments, scaling Shop Pay to over $100B in GMV and building Shop Cash from the ground up.
That experience taught me a fundamental lesson: you can’t force infrastructure built for one era to serve the next.
We spent years optimizing the card-not-present stack for humans, but as AI agents began to emerge, it became obvious that human-centric rails would never support machine-centric commerce.
Every generational shift in commerce requires a new infrastructure layer.
- In-Person Commerce needed plastic cards (Visa/Mastercard).
- Internet Commerce needed developer payment APIs (Stripe).
- Machine Commerce needs a way for software to spend across the API economy.
AI agents have become more than just software, and are now becoming autonomous economic actors. They will provision infrastructure, negotiate with vendors, allocate capital, and operate continuously across trillions of dollars in activity. That future cannot run on rails built for humans clicking “Buy”.
It requires an autonomous spend API: a layer that makes machine spend programmable, safe, and scalable. That’s what we’re building at Sapiom.
What is Sapiom’s solution? What challenge does it solve?
Economic activity is shifting from human-to-business to machine-to-business. Agents will go beyond simply chat UIs and will start to act. They’ll provision compute, purchase data, call paid APIs, and coordinate complex workflows.
An agent running on the world’s best model is still constrained if it’s trapped behind hard-coded tools, waiting for a human to provision vendor accounts, billing methods, approval flows, and integrations. That friction is the hard ceiling on the agentic economy as we know it. Current systems force an impossible tradeoff: give agents autonomy and accept massive risk, or enforce safety and accept stagnation.
Sapiom is the autonomous spend API for the machine-to-business economy. We abstract identity, wallets, policy, risk, and settlement into one integration, enabling agents and AI-built applications to safely transact with the real world.
Why did Sapiom want to work with Okta?
Identity is the foundation of trust, and trust is the foundation of autonomous commerce.
Before an agent can spend money, it has to be identifiable, attributable, and governable. That’s an identity problem first and foremost. In the human economy, Okta solved a critical problem: how do you verify who someone is and what they're authorized to do across enterprise systems? That same problem exists in the machine economy, but it's even harder.
When an AI agent requests access to a paid API or initiates a transaction, the receiving system needs to answer things like: Who is this agent? Who does it represent? What is it allowed to do? How much can it spend?
As agents become first-class economic actors, identity has to evolve beyond users and sessions to encompass software entities that act continuously and independently. That’s exactly where Sapiom and Okta’s visions align.
We wanted to work with a partner who deeply understands identity at scale as we build the equivalent layer for machines. Working with Okta means we’re building on top of a system that enterprises already trust to define access, enforce policy, and manage risk at scale.
How is Sapiom working with Okta? What support do you look for in a corporate partner?
We're exploring how Okta's identity infrastructure can extend to agent authentication (KYA), to enable safe, trustworthy agents that operate within spend guardrails. Together, we envision a complete trust layer for autonomous agents that enables enterprises to deploy agentic workflows with confidence.
In a corporate partner, we look for three things: domain expertise we can learn from, a shared conviction about where the market is heading, and willingness to collaborate on hard problems that don't have established playbooks yet. Okta brings all three – particularly on the identity side, which is core to making machine commerce trustworthy.
What trends do you expect to see in the Agentic Commerce industry?
- From chatbots to economic actors. We're past the 'AI as assistant' phase. Agents are becoming autonomous participants in the economy: purchasing services, managing budgets, negotiating with vendors. The companies that win will be the ones building infrastructure for agents that do, not just agents that talk.
- Identity becomes the control layer. As agents proliferate, the question shifts from 'Can this agent do this task?' to 'Should this agent be allowed to do this task, with this budget, on behalf of this principal?' Identity, policy, and permissioning become the critical infrastructure, not an afterthought.
- The API economy explodes. Machine-to-business commerce will dwarf human-to-business commerce in transaction volume. Every SaaS product, every data provider, every cloud service will need to be agent-accessible. We'll see a massive expansion in programmatic purchasing and the infrastructure to support it.
Interested in joining Okta Ventures? Check out our FAQ here and feel free to reach out to our team or submit your business for review.
