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About Rye
Rye is universal agentic commerce infrastructure enabling in-app purchases inside AI assistants, rewards platforms, and corporate gifting tools without redirecting users. It currently connects 400+ brands and processes 120,000+ orders monthly.
Core capability: the Universal Checkout API — three calls from product lookup to confirmed order, with ~10-second checkout latency and 99.9% uptime. Brands join with zero engineering effort by connecting existing sites, stay merchant-of-record, and keep customer data and post-purchase relationships. Rye supports both direct routing (~260 commissioned merchants, 14–17.5% commission) and agentic routing covering any URL.
Market pain points: AI agents cannot complete checkout on traditional sites — a 60-second timeout loses the sale; protocol-based alternatives (Google UCP, ChatGPT ACP, Amazon Buy for Me) are each single-ecosystem plays requiring stacked integrations with 4–12 weeks of engineering work.
Recent development (2026-03 to 2026-09): April — three-call checkout API with production SDK (retries, idempotency); May — Rye for Rewards, freeing loyalty programs from affiliate-network redirects; June — Returns API addressing post-purchase trust for agent-initiated orders, and approval as an agent in Stripe's Agentic Commerce Suite. Merchant network grew ~50 brands/month. No significant negative events found in the past two years.
Rye was founded in 2021 with the initial vision of becoming the "Stripe for e-commerce," and at one point planned to build a decentralized e-commerce API on the Solana blockchain, securing $14 million in seed funding led by a16z crypto. It then underwent key pivots: early focus on social commerce, followed by expansion into B2B areas (cross-border e-commerce, corporate gifting, etc.). In 2024, it released the Universal Selling API, aggregating product data from Amazon and Shopify, processing over 120,000 orders per month, validating its "sell anything" API model. In August 2025, it launched the Universal Checkout API, enabling AI shopping agents to complete checkout from any merchant with just a product URL and payment token, with sub-5-second order processing and 99.9% reliability, targeting the $1.7 trillion agentic commerce market. These milestones show Rye's long-term evolution from a Web3 concept to AI commerce infrastructure.
Justin Kan (Co-Founder): A renowned serial entrepreneur who co-founded the live-streaming platform Justin.tv and Twitch, and later founded legal-tech company Atrium. He is now a co-founder of Rye, leading the development of Web3 e-commerce infrastructure.
Robin Chan (Co-Founder): An early-stage tech investor and entrepreneur who has invested in companies such as Twitter and Square, and has been involved in founding multiple Web3 projects. He is now a co-founder of Rye, focusing on strategy and ecosystem partnerships.