Rye

Rye is agentic commerce infrastructure. Founded in 2021 with the vision of a Stripe for eCommerce, the company spent years building a universal selling API across Amazon, Shopify, and B2B segments before pivoting into the problem that had stalled every AI shopping demo: checkout. AI agents can browse and recommend products but consistently fail at the buy step, because merchant fraud detection systems block automated transactions and every merchant has different checkout flows, form fields, tax rules, and shipping options. Rye calls this the checkout wall, and its Universal Checkout API is built to break it.

The contract is deliberately simple: a developer sends a product detail page URL, buyer identity, and a third party tokenized payment method, and gets back a confirmed merchant order and status. Under the hood, an AI driven browser orchestration layer resolves real price, tax, and shipping from the live merchant session, navigates the checkout, and places the order, then caches successful runs as deterministic workflows that run roughly eight times faster on repeat and self repair via AI when pages change. The company reports coverage of more than fifteen thousand merchants at ninety nine point nine percent order reliability, with sub five second checkout on Shopify and Amazon via direct integrations and targets of sub thirty five second offer resolution and sub ten second checkout on arbitrary stores. Payment data never touches the agent or the LLM: raw cardholder data is tokenized through PCI compliant providers like Stripe, Basis Theory, and Prava, per transaction spend controls are enforced at the execution layer so orders only place within a set budget, and buyers can be shown final costs before charging or run fully automated fire and forget. Rye complements checkout with a Product Data API for pre purchase lookups and a Returns API that files returns, surfaces prepaid labels, and tracks refunds to settlement for Shopify. Partnerships extend the stack: Skyfire supplies verifiable agent identity at the merchant edge, and AgentCash brings x402 stablecoin payments. Present constraints include US only shipping, physical goods, and one product per checkout, described as roadmap items.

Rye fits developers and AI shopping and agentic commerce companies that need to turn a product URL into a completed order without building brittle per merchant integrations. It sits alongside protocol approaches like ACP and UCP as the universal fallback for the long tail of merchants that never opt in.