How Amex Ventures Is Supporting the Era of Agentic Commerce

At Amex Ventures, we invest in technologies and founders that we believe could help shape the next evolution of commerce. One of the most important shifts underway is the rise of AI agents and agentic commerce. As AI agents begin to move beyond discovery and assistance toward acting on behalf of customers, they could influence how consumers and businesses discover products and services, make decisions, and complete transactions.

This evolution is not just a change in customer experience, but a broader enhancement of the underlying infrastructure. Companies building in this developing space will need to meet higher standards across identity, authorization, and trust, including verifying who is acting, ensuring alignment with user intent, and enabling secure, compliant, and scalable transactions. The importance and complexity of these standards increase in an agent-powered world, and the companies addressing them will help shape how this ecosystem evolves.

Our perspective on this industry shift is also informed by the recent launch of the American Express Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE) Developer Kit™, which outlines our approach to enabling trusted, intent-driven agentic transactions. As AI agents take on a more active role in commerce, we continue to look closely at founders seeking to build the infrastructure, trust layers, and customer experiences that will define this next era.

We apply this perspective through our investment strategy by identifying startups building infrastructure that could help support agentic commerce as it grows. Our focus areas include identity, authorization, payments, and enterprise capabilities that underpin trust, control, and interoperability in AI-executed transactions.

We are particularly interested in founders building with enterprise requirements in mind, including security, compliance readiness and integration into existing workflows, as well as companies whose capabilities may be relevant to American Express business units and innovation teams.

One example of this approach is our investment in Nekuda, which is focused on building infrastructure that helps enable AI agents to make secure, autonomous payments by managing credentials, enforcing user intent, and ensuring transactions are trusted and authorized.

Beyond investing, we also help connect portfolio companies with strategically relevant teams across American Express. Nearly two-thirds of our portfolio companies have had a commercial relationship with American Express, helping create opportunities to explore how emerging capabilities may apply across real-world business needs.

We also extend this work by bringing together founders, partners, and operators to share perspectives and advance important industry conversations. Recently, we hosted a discussion with leaders across the startup and AI ecosystem to explore how agentic commerce is evolving and where the greatest opportunities lie.

Founders building in agentic commerce can contact the Amex Ventures team at amexventures@aexp.com. You can also follow Amex Ventures on LinkedIn for updates.

Published Date July 1, 2026