# Silicon Valley startups are about to hand corporate credit cards to AI agents > Source: > Published: 2026-08-11 15:00:00+00:00 The typical early-stage startup team used to comprise a pair of founders and a handful of software engineers. Now that founding team is just as likely to include [AI](https://www.fastcompany.com/section/artificial-intelligence) agents as it is human employees—and the companies that serve startups are racing to adapt. For Mercury, a popular Silicon Valley banking solution, that shift in team composition has prompted the development of a new feature: AI agent cards, or virtual credit cards that businesses can use to delegate and automate purchasing decisions. The cards launch today as part of a broader expansion of Mercury’s spend management tools. “People have already been manually issuing our virtual cards [to agents],” says Mercury’s cofounder and CEO, Immad Akhund, who closely tracks customer behavior. Now, Mercury will enable that process with better controls, including the ability to audit spending by agents. “You can have a lot of control while having agents with some ability to spend,” he says. Mercury has been a founder favorite since its launch in 2019. Akhund, who spent a year as a part-time partner at the famed startup incubator Y Combinator (YC) in 2017, designed the company as a banking solution for software-centric entrepreneurs like himself. Mercury first made inroads with YC founders, who valued its branchless onboarding process, then captured billions of dollars more in deposits in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank’s [2023 unraveling.](https://www.fastcompany.com/90864395/silicon-valley-bank-an-its-a-wonderful-life-bank-run-for-the-digital-age) During that bank run—the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history—Mercury acted quickly to transform itself into a safe haven. Within a matter of days, thanks to moves like increased FDIC insurance coverage, Mercury had netted $2 billion in deposits and 8,700 new customers. The company, which has been profitable on a GAAP basis for the past four years and generates more than $650 million in annualized revenue, says that it now serves one in three U.S. startups. Even more telling, Mercury says it onboarded more than twice as many AI startup customers in 2025 as it did the year prior. In addition to AI agent cards, Mercury is launching several other new features in an expanded spend management offering. It’s part of the company’s effort to serve its banking customers as their businesses grow and become more complex—and to keep them from adopting the services of rival fintech solutions, including Ramp and Brex. Mercury’s new spend management features include budgets, automated accounting, policy enforcement, and integration with Command, Mercury’s AI assistant. This more full-fledged spend solution should help it better stand against fellow upstarts [Ramp](https://www.fastcompany.com/91502967/ramp-most-innovative-companies-2026), last valued at $44 billion in June, and Brex, which was [acquired by Capital One](https://www.fastcompany.com/91479823/capital-one-just-made-a-5-15-billion-move-that-could-change-how-businesses-manage-money) for $5.15 billion earlier this year. Both companies are known for their robust spend controls, which appeal to companies with complex hierarchies or global operations. At the time of their foundings, Mercury was focused on disrupting traditional banks and Ramp and Brex were focused on traditional spend platforms like SAP Concur. But as each adds new capabilities, they’re potentially targeting the same customer. Across fintech, [broader efforts are underway](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/announcing-agents-to-payments-ap2-protocol) to build payment rails for robots transacting with robots. The internet, adept at moving information, has never had a dedicated protocol for moving money. Agentic payments present an opportunity to finally address that need while at the same time supporting new forms of commerce, like buying concert tickets via chatbot the moment seats become available. Natural, an infrastructure-focused startup that counts Akhund as an angel investor, raised $30 million in Series A funding last month to help power agentic commerce. But for the time being, virtual cards are an efficient way to connect agents to the existing payments system, forming a bridge between old and new. “I’m a really big fan of cards,” says Akhund. “Everyone already supports cards. They already have fraud protection and disputes and charge-backs and things like that built in. For more day-to-day, sub-$2,000 purchases, I think like agentic cards will be the way most agents do payments.” Ramp has also dipped its toe in agentic payments; its accounts payable agents, for example, look for card-eligible vendors and pay them automatically. There are also new options for consumers. In May, Robinhood announced that its Robinhood Gold cardholders would be able to direct agents to [shop on their behalf](https://fortune.com/2026/05/27/robinhood-ai-agents/). Adoption of all these tools remains limited. But ultralean startup teams are taking Silicon Valley by storm, validating the 2024 prediction by OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, that a one-person startup worth $1 billion, a scenario “unimaginable without AI,” would soon come to pass. Mercury has diversified its customer base over the past year, adding more traditional small businesses as a complement to its technology roots. But its brand is most closely associated with startups on the bleeding edge. Transaction volume on virtual cards for agents may be small for now, but offering the cards positions Mercury as the bank of the future. Mercury is also in the process of obtaining a national bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The company applied for the license last year, and received conditional approval in April. In the early days of fintech, startups teamed up with traditional banks in order to avoid the regulatory hassle of a charter. Then, three years ago, millions of dollars in customer deposits went missing in a spectacular collapse involving Synapse and Evolve Bank & Trust—a debacle that entangled Mercury, which at the time was [Synapse’s largest client](https://fintechbusinessweekly.substack.com/p/the-synapse-evolve-disaster-one-year). For Mercury, it was time to eliminate middleman risk and take advantage of a charter’s structural benefits, including better margins and direct access to Federal Reserve payment rails. “Part of getting the bank charter is that people will see us as this trusted bank rather than as a fintech that works with banks and has a lot of disclaimers on the website about it,” Akhund says. Also in April, Mercury acquired Central, an AI-native payroll and benefits platform. Akhund envisions a future in which AI tools help to orchestrate and automate interconnected workflows that take advantage of Mercury’s full product suite. “You could imagine saying, hey, I just hired this person, set them up with payroll, set up a corporate card for them, set up reimbursement,” he says. “These AI features that we’re building work really well when you’re orchestrating multiple products underneath the hood.” It’s the power of compounding in action, with an AI-era spin.