AI agents may perform various tasks for a business or individual, but they may not complete half of them without the ability to actually make payments. Nevermined aims to solve that deficiency with their new agent card delegation feature based on secure technologies developed by Visa, Coinbase’s x402, and VGS.
AI agent infrastructure startup Nevermined has been tackling the problem of agentic financial empowerment for years. Finally, this week, the company unveiled its latest agentic payment product – Nevermined Pay.
What is Nevermined Pay?
The concept of agentic payments is simple. A user entrusts AI agent with a task. At some point, it requires making a payment, i.e. to book a trip, order goods, or settle some bills. If an agent has access to a virtual card or digital wallet, it can proceed without pausing. Otherwise, the users will have to initiate and finalize the transaction themselves.
What it takes for an agent to pay? It’s the difficult part.
As Nevermined Founder & CEO Donald Gossen puts it: “Sure, you could hand over your credit card number, but that’s not secure. And chances are, a payment made from your agent will get denied by the merchant, their PSP, their bank, or the card network anyway. Then there’s the maze of emerging options. Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, x402, MPP, A2A, ACP, UAP, credit cards, stablecoins…the list goes on. When handling money, mistakes are something you don’t want to make.”
Therefore, the company created Nevermined Pay – AI agent payments infrastructure connecting agents with spending power to merchants who want that revenue. This special payment app is integrated with top agentic payment solutions like Visa Intelligent Commerce, PayPal Braintree, and Stripe PSP infrastructure. This enables card delegation to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Codex, Copilot, Operator, Perplexity, Cursor, n8n, Cowork, OpenClaw, Strands and other AI agents, as well as programmatic acceptance of agent-initiated payments on the merchant side.
Importantly, card delegation comes with embedded security and user control features. Vital guardrails include spending limits regarding the money amount allowed to spend, restrictions on permitted spending places, and spending time limits. Cardholder data stays encrypted and protected through VGS secure vault and payment tokenization infrastructure.
How Nevermined Pay works?
Though the startup has been musing a bold idea that AI agents need to get access to real money and pay in a secure way for a while, it took some time for Nevermined to develop a solution routed in best industry practices since the payments infrastructure for it is still only emerging.
Nevermined CTO Aitor Argomaniz: “Current payment infrastructure was built for static transactions, like selling t-shirts on the internet, where the price of a small shirt doesn’t change over time. AI agents are dynamic and require an equally dynamic payments system that can respond instantly to new requests.”
Let’s break down some of the tech stack the solution relies on:
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Visa Intelligent Commerce – a suite of tools and APIs from Visa that help businesses embed payments directly into apps, platforms, and experiences. A “trusted execution layer” for agents, offering tokenization & credentials-on-file, spending limits, merchant categories, recurring logic, agent authorisation and risk signals.
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PayPal Braintree – full-stack payment platform owned by PayPal that helps businesses accept and manage payments globally. It provides orchestration and multi-method agent payments, letting agents reuse saved payment credentials, managing ongoing services with recurring payments, and choose the best payment method dynamically via smart routing.
- Stripe PSP (Payment Service Provider) infrastructure – all-in-one payments and financial infrastructure for internet businesses to accept and manage payments online. Stripe gives agents a fully programmable API-first financial backend, enabling them to trigger payments, refunds and subscriptions programmatically, charge based on events, usage, or thresholds, react to payment events (such as failures, disputes, renewals), and manage money flows.
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Very Good Security (VGS) vault – secure data custody layer for agentic payments, which holds and protects sensitive payment data so AI agents never access raw sensitive financial information. It vaults sensitive data (e.g. card numbers, bank details, PII), tokenizes it and controls access via policies, permissions, and audit logs.
- Coinbase’s x402 open standard for “agentic commerce” is responsible for real-time payment verification and settlement.
On the user side, Nevermined Pay AI agent payments work the following way:
1. User logins in the app.
2. Choosing suitable card delegation method to link cards from Visa, Stripe, or PayPal Braintree.
3. Securely enter details of the card chosen to fund AI agent transactions.
4. Set payment instructions: total amount, number of transactions, per-purchase cap, merchant categories and time window acceptable for the agent to spend.
5. Give the secure key to your chosen agent. Now it can spend money within the set constraints.
Who could use Nevermined agentic card delegation?
Card holders & agent builders
Anyone building or using AI agents that need to pay for APIs, datasets, cloud resources, or digital services autonomously without exposing raw card details.
Enterprises running fleets of agents
Organizations deploying multiple agents across workflows (procurement, data sourcing, SaaS operations) that require controlled, auditable spending.
Merchants & API providers
Businesses that want to accept payments from AI agents without rebuilding their checkout or billing stack. Linking cards from platforms like Visa, Stripe or PayPal Braintree, they can become agent-ready by default, agents simply pay through existing infrastructure.
MCP server & tool developers
Developers who want to monetize access to tools or services with built-in metering, billing, and permissioning, turning agent usage into revenue streams.
Bottom line
The agentic economy needs payment rails. Card holders need safe, controllable delegation. Merchants need a way to accept agent payments without replatforming. Until recently, this stack didn’t exist as a cohesive system. Now, it starts emerging and Nevermined Pay is one bright example.
