firmly raises $15 million to help stores sell through AI shopping tools

A Seattle company called firmly has raised $15 million to help online stores sell through AI shopping assistants. Mastercard, J.P. Morgan Payments and Samsung NEXT joined the round, which Squarepoint Capital led. The company also launched Ask Agent, a chat assistant a store can add to its own website with one line of code.

What changed

The new money is a Series A round, an early stage of startup funding. It brings firmly's total funding to about $20 million. Other investors included Alumni Ventures, ARK Invest, Benhamou Global Ventures, Granada Funds, Hike Ventures, The Mercantile Companies and Versus Ventures. The company says it will use the money to expand its main product, firmly Connect, to other countries and add links to more AI agents, marketplaces, social platforms and shoppable ads.

How it works

Each new place to shop, such as an AI assistant or a social network, normally needs its own technical connection to a store's products, stock levels, prices and checkout. firmly Connect aims to handle that for the store. It uses a no-code setup, so a merchant does not have to build a separate link for every new channel.

Ask Agent brings the idea to the store's own site. Shoppers describe what they want in plain language and get suggestions based on live inventory, pricing and catalog data. They can pay inside the chat. It also supports loyalty benefits, cross-selling and customer service after a purchase.

Who it affects

The main audience is online store owners who worry about being left out as shoppers turn to AI tools. firmly says merchants keep control of their customer relationships, payments, transaction data and merchant-of-record status. That means the store stays the official seller. The company says its setup can help sales channels reach more than 11 million merchants with over $900 billion in gross merchandise value, which is the total value of goods sold.

The timing matters. Adobe forecasts that AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail websites will rise about 130% year over year during the 2026 holiday shopping season.

What is not clear yet

The results so far come from the company itself. firmly says early users saw sales conversions rise by up to 18% and average order size grow by up to 23%. Those are best-case figures, and no outside check was given.

• No pricing for firmly Connect or Ask Agent was shared.
• No dates were given for the international expansion.
• The number of stores using the tools today was not stated.