Orthogonal Raises $4.3 Million Seed Round

Today we're announcing our $4.3 million seed round, led by Pantera Capital and backed by Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Decasonic, Blast, Outbound, Surreal by Premise, and other strategic investors.

What we're building

Orthogonal gives AI agents a unified way to discover and access the capabilities they need in real time. That means agents can complete complex tasks without consistently failing, hallucinating, or falling back on human intervention.

At its core: a discovery layer that surfaces the right capability for any task, a runtime that handles execution reliably, and infrastructure that keeps agents moving without breaking down in production.

Think of an agent that needs to find a lead, enrich its data, and reach out. Orthogonal handles the entire workflow without a human in the loop.

Orthogonal is already live in production with GTM teams and AI-native startups and currently hosts more than 35 APIs including Apollo, People Data Labs and Coresignal, with developers actively integrating Orthogonal into production agents and workflows.

On payments, Orthogonal already supports multiple rails including traditional fiat, x402, and MPP, with additional agent-native payment standards on the way.

Why we built this

When a person needs something done online, they search, find the right services, and stitch them together. An agent can't do that on its own. It's stuck with whatever tools it was originally given. The moment it needs something new, it fails, hallucinates, or hands the problem back to a human.

Using the wrong tools isn't just frustrating, but costly in both time and money. Discovery, orchestration, and payment are the three open problems standing between an agent and real autonomy. No one has put all three in one place. That's us.

Why now

Agentic commerce is projected to drive between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global economic activity by 2030. The infrastructure to support that doesn't exist yet. Orthogonal solves this. Agents can now discover the services they need in the moment, orchestrate them, and pay for them instantly.

What's next

The funding will be used to accelerate development of the company's core platform: infrastructure that enables AI agents to discover new capabilities, access services instantly, and complete payments in a single workflow. It will also support expansion of Orthogonal's engineering and go-to-market teams.

Orthogonal was founded by a team who built at the intersection of payments, APIs, infrastructure, and AI at Coinbase, Vercel, Google, and Amazon Robotics. We built Orthogonal because we kept running into this problem ourselves and knew we weren't the only ones.