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About Skyfire
Skyfire is a payment and identity infrastructure built for AI agents. Its core business has two layers: KYA (Know Your Agent), an identity protocol that issues signed JWTs to verify who built an agent, which human authorized it, and what it is allowed to do; and KYAPay, a settlement rail using USDC stablecoins that lets agents pay for APIs, data, or services without traditional bank accounts or credit cards. The main market pain points it addresses are: AI agents cannot pass KYC checks, corporate cards are too coarse for sub-metered usage, and every merchant has different payment and authentication schemes. Skyfire solves these by combining identity verification with a unified payment rail, so agents can transact across multiple merchants without bilateral agreements. In the past six months (2026-03-01 to 2026-09-01), Skyfire demonstrated an end-to-end agent checkout with Visa Intelligent Commerce in December 2025, and added an "AI agent checkout" feature in late 2025 that lets agents simulate human registration and payment flows on existing merchant sites. However, no reliable public information was found about specific developments between March and September 2026. One notable negative point within the last two years: the platform's payment fees are reported to be 2-3% per transaction, which some users may find high compared to traditional card networks. No other major negative events were documented in reliable sources.
Skyfire, positioned as the financial stack for the AI economy, has hit several long-term milestones. In August 2024, it completed an $8.5M seed round led by notable investors including Circle, Arrington Capital, and others, establishing its foundational funding. Later, Coinbase Ventures and a16z CSX provided strategic investment, bringing total disclosed funding to $9.5M, signaling institutional confidence in AI-native payments. A key technical milestone was the introduction of KYA (Know Your Agent) identity layer, adopted as part of Experian’s framework, and KYAPay settlement rail supporting stablecoin transactions. In December 2025, Skyfire demonstrated end-to-end agent checkout with Visa Intelligent Commerce, and later added AI agent checkout simulating human flows on existing merchant sites. These developments mark Skyfire’s evolution from concept to a working infrastructure for autonomous agent commerce.
Key developments (2026-03 to 2026-09):
Skyfire announced a partnership with Experian to launch the Know Your Agent (KYA) trust framework, integrating Experian's identity and fraud data into agent verification. Cloudflare enforces KYA at the network edge, validating agent tokens before requests reach merchants.
Skyfire launched a production integration with Sequentum's Checkout Agent, enabling real purchases on merchant sites using Skyfire for identity and payments, with SOC 2 Type 2 compliance and full audit trails.
In December 2025 (publicly demonstrated), Skyfire completed an end-to-end agentic commerce purchase on Visa's Intelligent Commerce network using KYAPay — the first autonomous agent to pay a Visa merchant with verifiable cryptographic identity. KYAPay exited beta in early 2026 and its settlement model (instant USDC, no chargeback round-trips) became a reference architecture for agent-to-agent commerce.
KYAPay was submitted as an IETF draft (draft-skyfire-kyapayprofile-01), standardizing the identity and payment protocol.
Future focus:
Skyfire will expand KYA beyond payments to API access, MCP server monetization, agent-to-agent transactions, and B2B procurement. The roadmap centers on making KYA the universal trust layer for agentic commerce, with partners like F5, Cequence, and Ory enabling broader adoption. Skyfire aims to become the Plaid + Mastercard SecureCode of the agent economy.
Skyfire's co-founders and key executives are:
Amir Sarhangi - Co-Founder & CEO. Previously founded Jibe Mobile, served as VP of Product at Ripple, and held roles at Vodafone, Deloitte, and Intel. He holds a BS from California Polytechnic State University.
Craig DeWitt - Co-Founder. Former Director of Product at Ripple, with experience at Adobe and Bloomberg. He holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BS from UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.
Both bring deep expertise in payments, blockchain, AI, and fintech infrastructure.