Hey YC! We’re Cole and Eliot, and we’re building Locus, which is payment infrastructure for AI agents. We help developers safely connect agents to funds and define exactly how those funds can be used, with agent identities, budgets, permissions, and full audit trails.

Our Story

We came to this problem from opposite ends of the same frontier. Cole spent last summer at Coinbase, building B2B payment products and seeing firsthand how control and compliance shape financial infrastructure. Eliot was working at Scale AI, maintaining data pipelines for the world’s largest AI labs. He watched as models began to tackle sustained, open-ended tasks. Both of us realized that as agents grow more capable, the next bottleneck isn’t intelligence: it’s trust.

Payments are a web primitive. And as we task agents with increasingly long and noisy workflows, they will inevitably need to make payments. This might mean ordering parts to complete a physical repair, paying another agent for design work, hiring a contractor for a one-off task, or making micropayments to access private data.

But today’s payment rails were built for humans, not autonomous systems. There’s no safe way to say, “this agent can spend $500/day on these vendors,” and have that rule enforced. No audit trail showing which agent authorized what and why.

Make Them Pay — Today!

Recently, OpenAI, Google, Visa, and Coinbase all released their own agentic payment protocols. But while everyone’s racing to build the next payment rails, nobody’s building the control layer: the foundation that actually gives you power over how your agents use these rails. Locus is building exactly this.

Locus currently supports USDC on Base, with support for ACH and wire transfers coming soon. You can give your agents spending power and start building today.

Demo

We built a micro-task payment system where an agent evaluates work submissions, scores quality, and pays contributors automatically. You set rules like "max $50 per payout, $500/day, must include a justification." The agent handles the rest. No manual approval needed, but you have full audit trails showing who got paid, when, and why.
https://youtu.be/ICSzoZTq9JE

Join Us!

If you build agents, join our beta and help shape the future of agent-driven finance! Learn more and sign up at paywithlocus.com. We'll give you $10 in USDC to experiment with.

We’re also building a community of builders in the space and would love for you to join. If agents with spending power sound at all interesting to you, join here to stay in the loop: https://discord.gg/TGnjUceXwE

https://youtu.be/6rntHGR475U\

Contact Us

Email founders@paywithlocus.com, or find us on LinkedIn or X.

Cole Dermott: LinkedIn, or DM @coledermo on X.

Eliot Lee: LinkedIn, or DM @eliotlee33 on X.