Every time a new AI assistant tool launches, seemingly every week, it announces it’s handling checkout and payments through Stripe’s tool, Link.
Instinct, Muse and Grok Bot agents all make purchases on their human users’ behalves through Link; so do work-focused agents like Skydive and Town, as well as a long tail of newer or more niche apps, like Underdog, announced earlier this week. (Anthropic and OpenAI use Link, but not for agentic commerce just yet.)
All in all, Link currently powers about 200 agents, says Dan Hill, in charge of Link as head of consumer product at Stripe. He and his team are in Slack channels with each one, hearing new capability requests or issues in daily stand-ups, and moving fast to try to keep up with each launch.
With 300 million users overall across bigger businesses like Airbnb, Anthropologie and Uber, agents remain a relatively small piece of Link’s overall reach. But the trend line of increasing agentic usage is clear, says Hill.
“Agentic commerce is here, people are using it, it’s going to keep growing,” he adds. “The volume we’re seeing now is becoming very material.”
Stripe ran the numbers on agentic spend with Link in September — back when there were about 70 agents signed on. (Basic math: that means the number of agents signed up has more than doubled since these numbers were crunched.)
The private tech company is sharing that data with Upstarts exclusively first. We’ve got intel on how much payment volume increased, what categories of spend were most popular, and typical transaction size.
The full breakdown on agentic spending – and more from Hill on what it’s like to be on the Link side of all of this mayhem – below.
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