Orthogonal Lets AI Agents Pay for APIs Without Human Babysitting

The Macro: Agents Want to Use APIs and the Billing Infrastructure Does Not Exist

AI agents are increasingly autonomous. They browse the web, write code, and orchestrate workflows across multiple services. But when an agent needs to use an API, the current experience is absurd. A human has to find the API, sign up for an account, get an API key, configure billing, set up rate limits, and hard-code the credentials into the agent’s configuration. For every single API.

This does not scale. An agent that needs to access 20 different APIs requires 20 different account setups, 20 billing relationships, and 20 sets of credentials to manage. The overhead kills the whole point of autonomous agents. You wanted the agent to work independently, but you spent three hours setting up API keys for it.

The problem gets worse as agents become more capable. A sophisticated agent might dynamically decide which APIs to use based on the task at hand. You cannot pre-configure API keys for every service an agent might possibly need. There needs to be a way for agents to discover APIs, access them immediately, and pay for usage without human intervention.

This is a payment infrastructure problem disguised as a developer tools problem. Someone needs to build the layer that lets agents pay for API access seamlessly, the way Stripe lets websites accept payments seamlessly.

The Micro: Ex-Coinbase and Ex-Amazon Engineers Building Agent API Payments

Christian Pickett and Bera Sogut cofounded Orthogonal. Christian previously worked on payments at Coinbase and billing at Vercel. Bera was an engineer at Amazon Robotics and is a 2x ACM ICPC World Finalist. They are a two-person team from San Francisco, part of YC Winter 2026 with Tyler Bosmeny.

The backgrounds are precisely right. One cofounder understands payment infrastructure at a deep level from Coinbase and Vercel. The other understands the engineering challenges of autonomous systems from Amazon Robotics. Together they are building the payment layer for the agent economy.

Orthogonal gives developers and agents instant access to hundreds of APIs through their MCP or SDK. No API key management. No billing headaches. Pay as you go. API providers list their services once and become instantly discoverable by agents. The platform already has 25+ integrated partners including Composio, People Data Labs, ContactOut, Crustdata, and ScrapeGraph.

The product works with OpenClaw, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other agent platforms. Documentation lives at docs.orthogonal.com. A Discord community is active.

The Verdict

Orthogonal is building essential plumbing for the agent economy. The problem is real, the market is growing, and the founding team has the right combination of payments and systems engineering experience. If agents become the primary consumers of APIs, Orthogonal could become the default payment layer.

The risk is that existing API marketplaces like RapidAPI add agent-compatible payment features. The risk is also that Stripe builds an agent billing product. But both of these would require rethinking their existing architectures for agent-first use cases, and Orthogonal has a head start.

In 30 days, I want to see the number of API calls processed through Orthogonal. In 60 days, the question is whether the pay-as-you-go model produces attractive economics for API providers. If providers earn more through Orthogonal than through direct API key sales, the supply side grows quickly. In 90 days, I want to know about agent adoption. How many autonomous agents are using Orthogonal to discover and pay for APIs without human setup? That number is the core metric.