Startup Raises $6.5 Million with Technology Designed To Ease Payments Made By “AI Employees”

Alsa, a San Francisco-based payment startup that has designed a technology allowing AI agents to transact autonomously at scale, has attracted $6.5 million in funding from investors, with a new seed round led by Alibaba and Tribe Capital, the company announced.

At a time when both entrepreneurs are looking to use AI agents to perform work now done by humans, the startup addresses a gap in the AI agents’ capabilities in a solution aimed at microbusinesses and lean startups.

Alsa has developed a unified transaction layer, built around its own API key, that lets AI agents and developers discover, access and pay for digital resources through a single programmable interface, according to co-founder Jordan Liu. It relies on usage-based billing that acts as a “meter to enforce users’ spending controls and settlement in fiat or stablecoins.

Most digital platforms are designed for people to perform tasks such as creating accounts, subscribing, signing contracts and making payments, noted Liu. Autonomous agents cannot navigate these pathways smoothly, posing a roadblock to their use at scale, he pointed out.

“We are building the Amazon for agents,” said Liu. “Amazon itself is the ‘everything store’ for humans. Humans consume clothes, sneakers, and tickets. Agents consume data, APIs, and software.”

In addition to Tribe Capital and Alibaba, Alsa has attracted funding from Draper Associates, Sumitomo Corporation, Saison Capital and other investors, according to Liu. Liu previously founded a PayPal-like digital wallet aimed at unbanked customers in Southeast Asia and a blockchain wallet.

Alsa, which has a 10-person team, plans to use the new funding to expand its resource marketplace and expand enterprise controls for budgets, approval workflows and audit trails, Lui said. It also plans to scale the infrastructure required for autonomous agents to transact securely at internet scale.

“We believe that as AI agents are increasingly dominating internet traffic, the financial rails underpinning the internet (subscriptions, APIs, ad monetization, etc.) must adapt to suit these new participants,” said Francis Zhan, an investor at Tribe Capital, in an emailed statement. “Jordan’s vision and his extraordinary ability to execute across both local and international markets gave us the conviction to bet on AIsa.”

Liu says Alsa is designed to help one-person companies and small teams reduce development work. “Enterprises have all the resources to assign a DevOps team to integrate, open accounts, and manage API credentials. They can do it in-house,” he says. “But for a one-person company or small team, it’s really painful to manage the whole procurement process across multiple vendors with different APIs. We’re building this to serve one-person companies and individuals.”

One-person companies increasingly rely on “AI employees” for specific tasks such as HR, finance, and marketing. If the cost of tokens comes down in the future, more microbusinesses and very small companies are likely to adopt this method of getting work done and will need simpler ways to handle tasks like payments, Liu believes. “That’s why we want to enable this resource layer, to make their procurement layer and payment process more efficient,” he says.

Liu noted that many major payment networks grew in tandem with commerce platforms whose users they served. For instance, PayPal took off as eBay grew, and Stripe became popular as internet commerce required new payment options.

Alsa was founded in 2025 and saw a substantial uptick in usage in the first half of 2026, as the Open Claw ecosystem grew and was eventually acquired by OpenAI, Liu said. From February to June 2026, registered agent users on the platform and aggregate API calls and transactions processed through the network grew dramatically, he noted. The company has onboarded more than 20,000 registered agents without paid marketing, he said.