Mercury Fund Dat at the Ion - Agentic Commerce

Mercury Fund Day, previously known as Software Day, is a monthly series driving the support, inspiration, and connections needed to help startups on their path to rapid, sustainable growth. Each month, Mercury Fund Day will include office hours (by application), a keynote session, and networking.

Afterward, join us for a networking happy hour at Second Draught, brought to you by Gunderson Dettmer, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs, investors, and industry professionals, forging connections that could shape the future of your venture.

This month’s topic: Agentic Commerce. We are entering the next paradigm shift in commerce: agentic commerce, where software agents act as economic actors – discovering services, negotiating terms, and executing settlement with minimal human intervention, but anchored to an explicit human mandate. This isn’t a prettier checkout flow. It’s a structural change from synchronous “session-based” authorization to asynchronous, mandate-based delegation – and it’s arriving as protocols, payment rails, and merchant systems finally become machine-readable. Mercury believes the next generation of commerce winners will be built in the gap between what today’s rails can underwrite and what tomorrow’s agents will demand.