❓ Problem

AI agents are about to become serious shoppers. Bain estimates the US agentic commerce market could reach $300 to $500 billion by 2030, roughly 15% to 25% of all e-commerce. Your assistant books the hotel, picks the restaurant, fills the grocery basket. Every one of those decisions sends business to a merchant. bain

But a clever chatbot isn't a commercial relationship. To get a customer a better price, or to earn a referral fee on the sale, someone has to sign a deal with the merchant. Right now that means every agent company negotiating separately with thousands of merchants, which is a fantastic way to spend three years in meetings and still have nothing to show for it.

Worse, the little guys never get a seat at the table. A merchant won't hand out preferential rates to an agent that sends four bookings a month. Meanwhile merchants are already paying through the nose for distribution: independent hotels pay 15-30% in OTA commissions, and 63.4% of their bookings come through OTAs. There's a huge pile of commission money looking for a new home, and no one has built the pipe to route it to agents. codeless

✅ Solution

A merchant network for AI agents. Think affiliate network meets buying club.

• Pool the demand. Bring many agents under one roof so their combined purchasing volume can negotiate customer discounts and referral commissions that none of them could win alone.
• One integration. Agents query a single API (and an MCP server) for eligible offers at the moment of intent: "find me a boutique hotel in Lisbon under $200" returns rooms with a member rate attached.
• Agents close, everyone gets paid. The agent helps the customer book or buy, and earns a share of the commission on completed purchases. The network handles merchant onboarding, tracking, attribution and payouts, and keeps a slice of every commission.
• Start narrow. Independent hotels first, accessed through existing booking partners. Bring a handful of agents together, prove they deliver paying guests, then use that volume to negotiate stronger, more exclusive offers. Expand category by category as demand grows.

The wedge is simple: be the place an agent goes when it wants a deal it can't get on its own.

📊 Key Numbers

Market size

• Bain puts US agentic commerce at $300-500 billion by 2030. Morgan Stanley is more conservative at $190-385 billion, 10% to 20% of US online retail. bainmorganstanley
• US affiliate marketing spend is projected to hit $13.2 billion in 2026, up 10.1% year on year. That's the budget merchants already set aside to pay someone else for sending them customers. tribuneindia
• Travel is the richest seam. Expedia charges independent hotels 15-30%, versus 10-15% for big brands, so smaller properties have the most to gain from a cheaper channel. prenohq

TAM / SAM / SOM (our estimates)

• TAM: if agents drive $300 billion of US commerce by 2030 and merchants pay a blended ~5% for that distribution, that's a ~$15 billion annual commission pool.
• SAM: agent-booked travel and hospitality, where commissions run 10-25%, plausibly $3-5 billion of that pool.
• SOM: a network keeping 20-30% of commissions on $1 billion of agent-driven GMV at an 8% blended rate earns ~$16-24 million a year.