A unified payment layer designed for autonomous agents, not just humans
Solving the payment friction for AI agents
Lava Payments, a new startup founded by Mitchell Jones, wants to make online payments seamless in a future where AI agents perform more transactions on behalf of users. The company’s core product is a digital wallet that uses shared usage credits across multiple merchants and AI services, eliminating repetitive re-authentication and per-tool payment approvals.
Jones says the idea came after his own frustrating experiments building an AI form-filling agent — a project that cost over $400 due to fragmented subscriptions and payment flows.
“I didn’t want to keep rebuying access to the same thing under a different wrapper,” Jones explained. “What I wanted was a single wallet… so I could pay for what I was using.”
How Lava works
Lava enables merchants to let customers upload credits into a wallet that can be spent at any participating merchant or foundational AI model provider — including GPT and Claude — on a pay-as-you-go basis.
For example:
- A user funds their Lava wallet once.
- An AI agent can then access multiple tools or services without additional prompts for payment.
- Transactions happen invisibly in the background, removing the “checkout bottleneck” for agents.
Jones compares it to paying for internet access through a carrier — you don’t pay separately for every webpage you visit.
Backing and investors
On Wednesday, Lava announced a $5.8 million seed round led by Lerer Hippeau, joined by Harlem Capital, Streamlined Ventures, and Westbound.
Jones’ connection to lead investor Will McKelvey goes back to high school, with McKelvey following his career from Goldman Sachs and Meta to previous fintech ventures Parable and Lendtable (YC S20).
Building for the “agent-native economy”
Lava is positioning itself as the invisible infrastructure layer for the AI-powered internet, enabling agents to move, transact, and build without friction.
The fresh capital will go toward hiring, product development, and go-to-market strategies.
Competitors like Metronome are in the space, but Jones sees Lava’s differentiator in its broad interoperability and focus on cross-merchant credit sharing.
“We want to make sure that AI is something that can be used by every single person, even a kid from Dayton, like myself,” Jones said.
The bigger picture
As AI agents increasingly handle commerce autonomously, payment infrastructure will need to adapt. Lava’s approach — one wallet, universal credits, cross-platform compatibility — could serve as a foundational layer for this agent-native economy, much like payment gateways underpinned the web 2.0 era.
