firmly's $15M Series A Wires Merchants Into Agentic Shopping With Ask Agent and a No-Code Connect Layer

firmly, a Seattle no-code agentic commerce platform, has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Squarepoint Capital and launched Ask Agent, a conversational shopping experience for merchant websites. Strategic participants in the November 5, 2026 company release include J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard, and Samsung NEXT. Alumni Ventures, ARK Invest, Benhamou Global Ventures, Granada Funds, Hike Ventures, The Mercantile Companies, and Versus Ventures also joined, bringing total funding to about $20 million.

The company positions the capital against a channel problem merchants already feel. AI assistants, marketplaces, social networks, and shoppable ads keep inventing new storefronts, while catalogs, inventory, payments, and checkout still have to stay consistent. The release cites Adobe’s expectation that AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites will grow 130% year over year this holiday season, a figure that comes from firmly’s own materials. firmly’s answer is shared infrastructure so merchants connect once and stay merchant of record with their own payments and customer data.

Connect: one no-code pipe to agentic channels

firmly Connect is the company’s single no-code connection for selling through AI agents, marketplaces, social platforms, shoppable advertising, and other commerce destinations. Merchants keep control of customer relationships, transaction data, and merchant-of-record status. On the destination side, Connect is pitched as a way for AI assistants, publishers, social networks, and commerce channels to reach more than 11 million merchants representing more than $900 billion in GMV through one standardized link.

Co-founder and CEO Kumar Senthil’s quoted north star is selling in any channel with zero engineering effort. Unlike players that ask merchants to integrate outbound into each new surface, firmly says Connect integrates into the merchant stack and lets them turn destinations on as customers move. Co-founder and President Damien Balsan frames the same layer as a bridge between browser-automation flexibility used by systems such as Muse or Instinct and the security and efficiency of deterministic protocols such as UCP—without a line of merchant code. The Series A is meant to grow Connect globally across more merchants and more destinations.

Ask Agent: conversational shopping on the merchant’s own site

Alongside the funding, firmly launched Ask Agent, an end-to-end conversational shopping experience for merchant websites. Shoppers describe what they want in natural language and get recommendations against the merchant’s real-time catalog, pricing, and inventory. Discovery, in-chat checkout, loyalty, cross-sell, and post-purchase support sit inside the same conversation. The experience is designed to work with the merchant’s existing commerce stack and to install with a single line of JavaScript rather than a rebuild.

Early merchant deployments, as reported by the company, show conversion rate improvements of up to 18% and average order value increases of up to 23%. Those figures are company-reported from early deployments; the release does not publish a third-party audit of the lift or a breakdown by vertical. Independent latency, hallucination, or payment-failure rates for Ask Agent are likewise absent from the announcement.

Infrastructure first, own-site agent second

The product story is deliberately two-sided. Connect is the outbound pipe that puts a merchant’s catalog and checkout into agentic and social channels while leaving payments and customer ownership unchanged. Ask Agent is the inbound product that puts an agentic shopper on the merchant’s own domain with the same real-time catalog and checkout path. Together they argue that agentic commerce is an infrastructure problem—catalogs, inventory, identity, and checkout—more than a one-off chatbot widget.

What the Series A materials do not include is valuation, ARR, or a named roster of the early merchants behind the 18% and 23% lifts. Competitive tables against other agentic checkout and universal commerce protocol stacks are implied by Balsan’s Muse/Instinct-versus-UCP framing rather than scored head-to-head. For retailers staring at Adobe’s projected AI traffic spike and a growing list of agent storefronts, firmly’s claim is operational: one no-code connection outward, one JavaScript line inward, and the merchant still owns the sale.