Firmly

Firmly is a marketing technology company that specializes in customer engagement solutions. Their key product, Firmly Connect, enhances communication and relationship management for businesses. Founded in the U.S., they serve various industries looking to strengthen customer interactions.

Website: https://www.firmly.ai

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Company Wiki

firmly.ai is a Seattle-based agentic commerce platform founded in 2019 that enables merchants to sell across AI agents, social platforms, publishers, connected TV, and digital ad surfaces through a single, no-code integration. The company operates at the intersection of embedded checkout technology, distributed commerce, and AI-powered shopping infrastructure. Its primary products are the firmly platform and firmly Connect, a self-service onboarding tool that allows merchants to activate new agentic sales channels without engineering effort.

AI-generated reference entry from web research · Generated 2026-09-27. Citations identify available source support; claims without a citation are not independently verified.

Key Facts

  • Founded: 2019 [3]
  • Headquarters: Seattle, WA [7]
  • Employees (as of June 2026): 37 [4]
  • Total Funding Rounds: 4 rounds [6]
  • Known Funding Amount: $5.2 million (2026 round) [10]
  • Investors: Mastercard Start Path, Alumni Ventures, FJ Labs, Rachel Zoe Ventures, Mu Ventures, Davidovs Venture Collective (among others) [6]
  • Founders: Damien Balsan, Murali Krishnamurthy, Senthil Kumar [2]
  • Company Stage: Series A (per Crunchbase) [2]

Overview

firmly.ai positions itself as an agentic commerce infrastructure layer, enabling merchants to distribute their product catalogs and accept checkout across a wide range of digital surfaces without modifying their own websites or deploying custom engineering work [1]. Its core offering is described as a horizontal infrastructure layer that abstracts across fragmented commerce protocols—including MCP, AP2, ACP, UCP, A2A, and KYA—so merchants can participate in multiple ecosystems through a single connection [7]. The company categorizes its solutions into five commerce modes: Agentic Commerce (AI agents shop on behalf of users), Publisher Commerce (in-article transactional checkout), Ad Commerce (shoppable ad surfaces with embedded checkout), Marketplace (multi-merchant search with single-merchant checkout), and Branded Commerce (white-labeled commerce backend for brands) [9]. firmly's business model is primarily B2B, generating revenue through partnerships and service fees from enabling shoppable content [5].

History

firmly.ai was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington [3]. According to Crunchbase, the company's founders include Damien Balsan, Murali Krishnamurthy, and Senthil Kumar (who serves as Co-Founder and CEO) [2]. The company raised at least four rounds of funding from at least seven investors, including Mastercard Start Path Emerging Fintech Program, Alumni Ventures, FJ Labs, Rachel Zoe Ventures, and Mu Ventures, with FJ Labs and Davidovs Venture Collective among the most recent investors [2][6]. In early 2026, a funding event of $5.2 million was reported [10]. The company operated largely in stealth mode for approximately five years before publicly announcing its Perplexity integration in March 2025 [11]. Firmly Connect, its no-code merchant onboarding platform, was publicly launched in March 2026 [7]. No acquisitions have been recorded as of the time of writing [4].

Market Position

firmly.ai operates in the emerging agentic commerce and distributed/embedded checkout market. CB Insights included the company in its November 2025 'Agentic Commerce Market Map' research brief [8]. Boston Consulting Group (BCG) cited firmly.ai as a key infrastructure provider enabling 'Commerce Everywhere' through its support for multi-merchant, multi-cart checkout across digital platforms [12]. Notable partnerships include Perplexity AI, CJ (the affiliate marketing network), payments technology company Aurus, and content platform Furniture.com [11][13][15]. Documented merchant users of Firmly Connect include Best Buy and Backcountry [7]. Customer relationships noted by CB Insights include AdoreMe and TeddyBlake [8]. The company's employee count was reported at 37 as of June 2026 [4].

Competition

CB Insights identifies firmly's top competitors as SmartCommerce, Bolt, and Skipify, with additional competitors including Ownit, Degpeg, and InstaSell [8][14]. SmartCommerce focuses on omnichannel commerce solutions including one-click carting and shoppable content, primarily for CPG brands [14]. Bolt offers one-click checkout solutions aimed at reducing cart abandonment [14]. Skipify operates as an identity-powered payment and e-commerce checkout provider [14]. Tracxn cites Klarna, Square, and Afterpay as broader competitive references in the payments and checkout space [4]. firmly differentiates itself from most of these competitors through its explicit protocol-abstraction approach—spanning MCP, AP2, ACP, UCP, and other emerging agentic standards—and its focus on preserving merchants' merchant-of-record status across all channels, which is a design decision that distinguishes it from gateway or marketplace models that take on transaction ownership [7].

Additional Links

Editorial note: Crunchbase lists the founding year as obfuscated behind a paywall; the 2019 date is sourced from PitchBook, CB Insights, and Tracxn and is treated as reliable. The precise total funding amount has not been independently confirmed beyond the $5.2M round reported by Signalbase; Crunchbase obfuscates the total. The Series A stage designation appears on Crunchbase but without a confirmed date or amount. Headquarters is listed as Seattle, WA in press releases but PitchBook lists Sammamish, WA; the press-release version (Seattle) is used as it appears in multiple company-issued announcements. BCG citation of firmly was sourced only through firmly's own news page and could not be independently corroborated via a direct BCG publication URL.