Lava Payments Secures $5.8M for AI Agent Digital Wallets
A new startup, Lava Payments, is entering the competitive fintech landscape with an ambitious goal: to streamline transactions for the burgeoning “agent-native economy.” Founded by Mitchell Jones, an alumnus of Y Combinator-backed Lendtable, Lava aims to solve a fundamental friction point in how AI agents interact with the digital world, particularly when it comes to payments.
Jones’s inspiration for Lava emerged from his own frustrations while experimenting with AI applications. He recounted a specific instance where a seemingly simple task – building a basic form-filling agent – quickly racked up over $400 in expenses. The core issue, he realized, lay not in the AI models themselves, but in the cumbersome payment infrastructure. He found himself repeatedly subscribing, re-authenticating, and paying separately for access to the same underlying AI tools, albeit through different platforms or “wrappers.” This process, he told TechCrunch, felt “fundamentally broken,” leading to the desire for a unified payment solution.
Lava Payments offers a digital wallet designed to centralize these transactions. The core concept revolves around universal usage credits that can be loaded into a wallet and then spent across various merchants and foundational AI models, such as GPT and Claude. This “pay-as-you-go” model eliminates the need for individual subscriptions or repeated authorizations for each service an AI agent might use. Instead of human users constantly approving micro-transactions, AI agents can autonomously draw from a single pool of credits as they perform diverse tasks.
Jones likened the current state of AI payments to a scenario where a user would have to pay Google every time they opened Google Maps, despite already paying their internet service provider like Verizon or AT&T for overall internet access. He argues that without a solution like Lava, AI agents are constantly “blocked” by payment hurdles, impeding their seamless operation across the internet.
To bring this vision to fruition, Lava Payments recently announced a successful $5.8 million seed funding round. The round was led by Lerer Hippeau, with participation from Harlem Capital, Streamlined Ventures, and Westbound. Mitchell Jones noted a personal connection facilitated the lead investment, having gone to high school with Will McKelvey, now an investor at Lerer Hippeau, who had been following Jones’s career for some time. This fresh capital will be strategically deployed to expand the team, accelerate product development, and refine go-to-market strategies.
Lava is positioned to compete with other players in this emerging space, such as Metronome. However, Jones emphasizes Lava’s distinct focus on the interconnectedness of the digital world and its commitment to building specifically for an “agent-native economy.” His ambition is for Lava to become the “invisible layer” that underpins the AI web, ensuring that AI agents can move, transact, and build without encountering payment friction, particularly as they increasingly navigate digital “checkout lines.”
Jones, who hails from a working-class family in Dayton, Ohio, credits his parents’ emphasis on hard work, saving, and education as formative influences. This ethos propelled him through Yale and early career stints at Goldman Sachs and Meta, before he ventured into founding fintech startups like Parable and the Y Combinator-backed Lendtable. His personal journey underscores his belief in democratizing access to powerful technologies. Ultimately, Jones envisions Lava making AI accessible to everyone, ensuring that “AI is something that can be used by every single person, even a kid from Dayton, like myself.”