AgentCash

Sam Ragsdale (ex-Merit Systems) just raised $10M from a16z Crypto to let AI agents handle their own payments — his new project AgentCash runs on the x402 protocol so bots can programmatically pay for API access without any humans in the loop. This sounds unhinged until you realize the AI agent boom has a payment problem nobody's solving: you can't scale a million agents if each one needs a credit card on file. The bet is that machine-to-machine commerce eventually goes fully autonomous, and when it does, the infrastructure is already built.