People without a coding background are discovering that they can build their own custom apps using Vibe Coding.

While these quick-to-code tools can help create good prototypes, launching them into full-scale production (as this reporter recently discovered) can be difficult without knowing how to integrate the application with external tech services, such as those that can send text messages via SMS, email, and process strip payments.

Alan Zerbib, who spent five years as Shopify’s director of engineering for payments, is developing a solution that can eliminate those back-end infrastructure headaches for nontechnical creators.

Last summer, Zerubb launched Sepoma San Francisco startup develops a financial layer that allows AI agents to securely purchase and access software, APIs, data and compute — essentially creating a payment system that lets AI automatically buy the services it needs.

Whenever an AI agent connects to an external device like Twilio for SMS, it requires authentication and micropayments. Sepom’s goal is to streamline this entire process, allowing AI agents to decide what to buy and when without human intervention.

“In the future, apps are going to use services that require payment. Right now, there’s really no easy way for agents to access all of them,” said Amit Kumar, a colleague at Excel.

Kumar has met with dozens of startups in the AI ​​payments space, but he believes Zerubb’s focus on the financial layer for businesses, rather than consumers, is what AI agents really need to work. That’s why Axel is leading Sepom’s $15 million seed round, with participation from Okta Ventures, Mylan Ventures, Array Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Entropic, and Coinbase Ventures.

“If you really think about it, every API call is a payment. Every time you send a text message, it’s a payment. Every time you spin up a server for AWS, it’s a payment,” Kumar told TechCrunch.

While it’s still early days for Sepom, the startup hopes its infrastructure solution will be adopted by webcoding companies and other companies that build AI agents that will eventually be tasked with doing many things on their own.

For example, anyone who webcodes an app with SMS capabilities won’t have to manually sign up for Twilio, add a credit card, and copy an API into their code. Instead, Sepom handles all of this in the background, and the person building the microapp will be charged as a pass-through fee for Twilio’s services through Lover, Bolt, or another webcoding platform.

Although Sepom is currently focused on B2B solutions, its technology could eventually empower personal AI agents to handle customer transactions. The expectation is that individuals will one day be trusted to make independent financial decisions, such as ordering an Uber or shopping on Amazon. While this future is exciting, Zorbib believes that AI won’t magically make people buy more things, which is why he’s instead focusing on building financial layers for businesses.