The First Debit Card for AI Agents

The First Debit Card for AI Agents — and the CEO Who Turned Down Stripe to Build It

Karen Serfaty had a job offer from Stripe.

She turned it down to make debit cards for AI agents instead.

If you think that sounds insane, you haven't watched what happens when an agent tries to spend money.

The workflow today: agent researches, plans, decides. Then it hands checkout back to you because it has no way to pay. The most valuable step in the transaction is the one the agent can't take.

Serfaty and Felipe Abello built Agentcard to solve exactly that — a debit card API designed for agents. Fund a wallet. Set a budget. Issue one-time cards that auto-close after a single charge. If something goes wrong, the blast radius is one capped card, not your bank account.

Agents out there right now are using Agentcard to pay for OpenAI subscriptions, order DoorDash through Claude, and buy cloud infrastructure on their own. Serfaty's demo shows an agent saying "buy me sushi" and the whole pipeline runs — search, cart, checkout, payment — inside the conversation.

The founders have the scars for this. Serfaty was CEO at Atlas (acquired by Remote.com), then GM of Cards at Remote. Abello was first employee at Rappi (YC W16) and a second-time YC founder with HelloGuru (W22). Tyler Bosmeny is their YC partner.

It works over MCP, CLI, or API. Any agent. Any workflow.

The takeaway: the next bottleneck for agents isn't intelligence. It's agency. The ability to act in the real world — which means spending real money. Agentcard is the infrastructure for that last mile.

Links: YC Profile | Website | @keyserfaty | @PipeAbellos | Partner: Tyler Bosmeny