Visa backs Replit in push for agentic payment infrastructure
The collaboration aims to enable developers and their AI agents to accept payments directly within the Replit environment, marking a strategic move into the emerging field of agentic commerce.
Visa has made an undisclosed investment in AI coding platform Replit, signalling a strategic entry into the infrastructure required for agentic payments. The two companies are currently exploring the integration of Visa’s payment products into Replit’s ecosystem, a move designed to allow developers and their AI agents to accept payments directly from customers without leaving the platform.
The partnership involves testing Visa Intelligent Commerce and the Trusted Agent Protocol. The latter is a system that enables AI agents to securely identify themselves by sharing intent and relevant customer details, ensuring that payments made by autonomous agents can be verified and trusted. Both organisations remain in an exploratory stage, with no joint products formally announced at this time.
Internal adoption of the platform has already been significant within the payments network. Visa confirmed that more than 1,000 of its employees have been utilising Replit for prototyping and development purposes. This internal usage underscores the platform’s growing utility in enterprise software creation, even as the companies work to define the technical parameters of their external collaboration.
Replit is simultaneously expanding its commercial reach by launching a self-serve enterprise access tier. This new offering allows companies to sign contracts worth up to $200,000 without engaging sales personnel. The tier includes enterprise-grade compliance features such as single sign-on, audit logs, and advanced permissions, reflecting a broader trend of demand for secure, scalable coding environments.
The investment highlights a competitive race among technology firms to establish the backbone for agentic commerce. While Visa and Replit focus on payment verification for coding agents, other major players are pursuing similar capabilities in different sectors. Retail investing platform Robinhood is developing agents for trading, while Google is working on agents for shopping, indicating a wider industry shift toward autonomous digital transactions.
Replit’s valuation has surged in recent months, tripling from $3 billion in September of last year to $9 billion following a $400 million Series D funding round led by Georgian Partners in March. CEO and founder Amjad Masad noted that the company’s churn is very low, with net retention reaching 300 per cent in some cases, suggesting strong enterprise stickiness once teams adopt the full Replit stack.
Masad stated that Visa’s involvement underscores the company’s mission to make coding available to anyone in a secure and robust manner. As demand for what is being termed “vibe-coding” platforms increases, valuations for startups such as Replit, Cursor, and Lovable have risen rapidly, driven by investor interest in the next generation of software development tools.
Despite the high-profile investment and rapid valuation growth, the timeline for any potential joint product launches between Visa and Replit remains undefined. The focus for now remains on testing protocols and understanding how AI agents can safely interact with financial infrastructure within a coding environment.
