A fresh direction for Rye: Now powering AI shopping & agentic commerce

Arjun Bhargava

Co-founder and CEO @ Rye

Aug 7, 2025

3 min read

We started Rye in 2021 with a bold vision: to build “Stripe for eCommerce” — an API simplifying the complexities of online checkout that any kind of company could use to sell any product they wanted. Our journey over the last few years has been a whirlwind of wins, sleepless nights, and explosive volume, accompanied by droughts, the occasional loss, and most importantly, a vast amount of learnings.

The Road to Reinvention

While I’m here to talk about Rye’s new and exciting direction, I wanted to first take some time to explain where we’ve come from over the last few years – what worked, what didn’t, and how it’s brought us to this watershed moment.

When we launched, we focused on social commerce, partnering with platforms like Shopify and Amazon to bridge the gap between product discovery and purchase. We’d seen the explosion of e-commerce during the pandemic firsthand, and watched consumers across the globe shift from shopping in person, to shopping online. As our favorite social platforms quickly became our favorite places to learn about new products from influencers and friends, a light bulb went off. Our API was built to facilitate native checkout, which we know leads to consistently higher conversion than affiliate link-driven checkout. This said, it was clear that consumer behavior wasn’t shifting towards this paradigm, and away from affiliate link shopping, as quickly as we’d hoped.

Then, we expanded our focus to B2B segments: cross-border marketplaces, corporate gifting, procurement, and employee engagement. These segments produce over $1T in global commerce, which told us that the demand was there. Many of these industries were also severely underoptimized — still employing spreadsheets and manual fulfillment teams to onboard vendors, and place orders. The problem we saw here was that things moved too slowly; deal-time averaged 4 months, and onboarding customers took ages. We realized we were slowly moving away from our original vision of being a universal selling API, and becoming an infrastructure company in the servicing business.

Cut to the present day: instead of Rye seeking out promising industries, an industry found us. Over the last 6 months, we’ve been working with startups in the AI space, helping both agentic commerce and AI shopping use cases.

AI Shopping startups are creating experiences that augment online shopping through product recommendations, search, and discovery. Perplexity and Open AI have recently released AI shopping features, but there’s an explosion of new startups doing everything from virtual try-ons, to being an oracle of all product reviews, to serving as your very own virtual personal shopper.
Agentic Commerce startups help users asynchronously buy products in the background. Everything from B2B procurement to facilitating “mundane” weekly ordering like groceries.

AI, Agents & the Future of Commerce

According to Edgar Dunn & Co, the TAM for just agentic commerce alone in 2025 is expected to be $135B – growing to $1.7T by 2030 and reflecting a CAGR of 67%. Effectively a 10X increase in transaction volume from shopping agents will occur over the next 10 years.

The problem, however, is that getting an e-commerce operation right remains difficult. Very difficult. There’s many layers involved in getting an order placed and fulfilled, and historically, it’s been impossible for “bots” to be able to do so (with good reason). Generally, bot purchasing has been used for malicious purposes: scraping and spoofing as competitive research, exploiting pricing errors, snatching up inventory immediately, or even testing/using fraudulent credit or gift cards. Agentic commerce is a new shift, however. With the right tools and processes, like Visa Intelligent Commerce, we’re ushering in a new way of buying and selling.

This is where Rye comes in. Yesterday, we announced the launch of V2 of our Sell Anything API, which allows AI and agentic commerce companies to sell products from any merchant or brand (not just Amazon or Shopify, like our V1). With merely a product URL and a buyer’s payment information, Rye can perform checkout native to any experience. AI Shopping apps can now use Rye to complete the buyer journey; if you’ve built the best personalized product recommendation engine, once your user is ready to buy at that highest point of context, they can do it right then and there, and through you.

Rye allows you to do this with just a few lines of code, and we’re far ahead of the competitor experiences that exist today. Our API has gotten ordering down to sub-five seconds, and order reliability is at 99.9%.

For agentic commerce workflows, gone are the days where you have to pause the task, and ask the shopper to input their payment and shipping information over and over. Using Rye, you can process orders asynchronously, and we’ll ensure you’re getting accurate price, shipping, and tax information.

Our new technology benefits everyone in the e-commerce cycle: consumers enjoy a frictionless experience, apps can focus on their UX while delivering immediate value, and merchants gain direct access to engaged customers while still maintaining their fraud protection.

We’re so excited for our new launch, and for the future at the intersection of AI and shopping, broadly. We can’t wait to see what experiences people build using Rye.